[Bookpossum]

I have just finished reading the book. In one sense I found it a bit of a slog because I really don't enjoy "stream of consciousness" novels. At the same time, some of the writing is absolutely exquisite, as for example this passage quite close to the beginning:

But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton's face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break, but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as they just turn over the weeds with pearl.

And then there is the magnificent meditation on death in the last few pages of the book:

Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

It is impossible to read that and not think of Woolf's choice to embrace death some years after writing this book.

Despite that sombre note, there are amusing moments in the book, for example only a couple of pages earlier concerning one of the guests at the party:

There were the Bradshaws, whom she disliked. She must go up to Lady Bradshaw (in grey and silver, balancing like a sea-lion at the edge of its tank, barking for invitations, Duchesses, the typical successful man's wife) ...

So overall, I am glad to have had the experience of reading Mrs Dalloway, but now need to read something completely different!