Oh, Virginia. You give me the most beautiful headache.

One reads, one is certain, the prose of Virginia Woolf --its meanders, its asides, its parenthetical interjections of thought and comment, its refusal of omniscient narration-- as one thinks: always distracted; always commenting upon what is with that human dissatisfaction with mere observed reality, as though the senses are neither dependable nor productive of interest without judgment; always more entertained by chatter than by any terse and dry observation: indeed, her place in the history of the novel is at that juncture when the form shifted from depiction of heroic historical moment to a new fascination with the workings of the mind --especially the reading and writing mind-- itself.