“How did one add up this and that and conclude it was liking one felt, or disliking?”
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This is the very first book I’ve ever read by Virginia Wolf and I think my expectations were entirely unrealistic. I appreciate that Wolf‘s prose is objectively quite lyrical and has depth. 

I could not easily follow her train of thought. The characters were not interesting and their musings were so meandering that I lost focus repeatedly. I found myself rereading whole pages just to try to get a clue and give it an honest chance. I really enjoy modern atmospheric and introspective novels, but this was so esoteric and verbose I didn’t want to read. 

I think she wanted us to dislike the men, which I’d absolutely did. Really all of them had such fragile egos. I was also trying to figure out if maybe Mr. Ramsay was suffering from Shell shock. 

I think my favorite part was when the house was abandoned, and we saw the passage of time through the attempts to beat back nature. I liked the parenthetical plots that were disbursed in that section. Maybe if it had been closer to that stylistically and shorter I would’ve enjoyed it more. 

As it was, this was disappointingly painful for me to get through, which is just my experience.