This has a more traditional structure than most of Woolf’s work. It’s basically a romantic comedy with four young people who are confused about which of the others they really love. Although there’s a lot of beautiful writing, I was a little aggravated by the amount of time the characters spent waffling around. 

 

I have to contrast this with The Voyage Out, which deals more ably with the process of falling in love. Like that novel, this one recognizes that love doesn’t always feel like love at first; in fact, it can feel vaguely threatening. 

 

In this novel, the main character is Katherine Hilbery, whose secret desire is to be a mathematician. Instead, she spends her days in her family home, acting as an assistant to her mother, who is writing an interminable biography of Katherine’s grandfather, a celebrated poet. Her mother, by the way, is one of the best characters, as she starts out as a ditz and ends up effortlessly and instinctively sorting everything out. 

 

Everyone expects Katherine to marry William Rodney, and she agrees to it, mainly to get away from being the sensible foil to her always-distracted mother. But she just can’t go through the motions of being in love. Everyone thinks Katherine is a snob, and she actually is, but she manages to get over that when she meets Ralph Denham, who is part of a large, chaotic, lower-class family. However, her attraction is not immediately apparent, and both go through most of the novel thinking the other dislikes them. 

 

Meanwhile, there’s Mary Datchet, a woman who spends her days working for woman’s suffrage, and who also loves Ralph. She’s given a certain nobility, but short shrift when it comes to romantic pairing-off. And there’s Katherine’s sweet, young, innocent cousin Clarissa, who ends up stealing William’s susceptible heart. Katherine’s father and aunts are the ones who are most incensed by the switching of partners, because it just isn’t done. What will people think?   

 

Here are some quotes. This is Katherine’s mother: 

< Ideas came to her chiefly when she was in motion. She liked to perambulate the room with a duster in her hand, with which she stopped to polish the backs of already lustrous books, musing and romancing as she did so. Suddenly the right phrase or the penetrating point of view would suggest itself, and she would drop her duster and write ecstatically for a few breathless moments; and then the mood would pass away, and the duster would be sought for, and the old books polished again. > 

 

< The three of them stood for a moment awkwardly silent, and then Mary left them in order to see that the great pitcher of coffee was properly handled, for beneath all her education she preserved the anxieties of one who owns china. > 

 

< Those elderly ladies, who sit on the edge of ballrooms sampling the stuff of humanity between finger and thumb and breathing so evenly that the necklaces, which rise and fall upon their breasts, seem to represent some elemental force, such as the waves upon the ocean of humanity, concluded, a little smilingly, that she would do. They meant that she would in all probability marry some young man whose mother they respected. >