3.5 stars

Introverted man goes out and regrets it.

truly delightful meditation on reality, consciousness, and what it means to be in love

This novel read like a prototype for the modern romantic comedy- a lovely balance of drama and wild melodrama with characters that are interesting and a class system that feels both restrictive and glamorous and perfectly in line with scratching that kardashian itch.

I really loved Mrs. Dalloway; I feel this is a less impressive version of Mrs. Dalloway. Trust Virginia Woolf to give the create of Shakespeare's sonnets to Anne Hathaway (his wife); I quite enjoyed that part actually. I did enjoy the dialogue (as I usually do with Woolf) but I just found it tired and boring.

Described as Woolf's attempt at a classic British romance, this story of a five-way love triangle in pre-War London is a lot weirder and more Woolfy than it initially seems after you dip down under the surface. Katherine Hilbery is wealthy, beautiful, secretly mathematical, and addicted to loneliness. She is engaged to Willam Rodney, a self-conscious but passionate lover of literature with one of the best introduction scenes in all of noveldom. And, although she isn't aware of it, Ralph Denham, the striving, intense, and awkward young lawyer who has stopped by her parents' house for tea is out of control in love with the idea of her. But maybe not with the actual her. To top things off, Mary Datchet, who works for the suffrage movement and hosts rollicking salons in her flat, realizes that she has fallen in love with her friend, Ralph. Plus Cassandra! There is a lot going on here, but Woolf keeps all the threads moving and gives us a slow-starting but effective meditation on what love is exactly, on family, on class, on literature, and on friendship. And I haven't even gotten to Katherine's mother (one of my favorite characters) and the archival implications of her lifelong project of organizing the papers of her famous literary father and turning them into a definitive biography. Right after she goes to visit Shakespeare's grave. Woolf hasn't hit her stride yet with this one, but she is getting there, and it's a fascinating second novel after the emotional explosion of The Voyage Out.

It's okay.