A very long time ago I started to read ‘To the Lighthouse’ by Virginia Woolf. I didn’t enjoy it, so alllll these years I had it in my mind that Woolf wasn’t for me. But maybe I have grown into her books because I think I was utterly mistaken. In someways I think it is book best enjoyed as you age yourself, or at least reread over a lifetime.

Mrs Dalloway is sublime. It is the slow but very intricate writing, the way it makes you feel like a languid June morning, how you hear a passing bee, a wave breaking. It is like a spa treatment for the mind. Not sure how that can be when the underlying theme is sanity and ‘madness’, but it is delicious writing. It deals also with how time slips forever on and on…and how memory repeats stories in the mind in such an unbridled way. Aging and the way our lives seem uncontrollable in their progression is another of the somewhat unsettling topics.

But still it is an absolute joy to read and bask in the language. Not to be read for plot and also it is a bit class-ist if you had to be picky.. but I loved it.

If you have read it what did you think about the repetition throughout of dogs barking in the distance? Also although people say this is stream of consciousness I think it is maybe free indirect discourse? Not sure.