As usual Woolf makes you work hard for your reward. I didn’t love this as much as I do some of her other novels, and was quite intrigued by the fact it was her most popular novel during her lifetime given that I found the first 300 pages or so of this book really difficult to slog through. However, the final sections contain some of the best writing I have ever read and I’m glad I forced myself to get there. I also think the novel doesn’t really have its full impact until you step back, consider it as a whole and realise how effectively Woolf captured the idea of time suddenly having passed you by without you  ever really noticing it, the banality of everyday life, and the fleeting and confusing nature of internal thoughts.

 What is incredibly effective about this book is that the feelings it invokes about the inevitable endless passing of time become even more effective the further time moves on from since the book was written and set. There was one part where Peggy, the youngest generation of the Pargiter family, asks her aunt Eleanor whether she ever thinks we will be able to see people on the other end of the phone. Reading this now, in 2022 knowing what Woolf never did, this seems to emphasise the whole idea that we can never know the future, never know what is just beyond our grasp. We can only live day to day, as we have always done.