Oooooo, wat beschikt mevrouw Woolf over een vileine pen zo nu en dan:

But Sir William Bradshaw stopped at the door to look at a picture. He looked in the corner for the engraver’s name. His wife looked too. Sir William Bradshaw was so interested in art ..

Ouch!

Een aanrader, Mrs. Dalloway. Viginia Woolf beschikt niet alleen maar over een scherpe pen, maar ook over het talent om beelden en geluiden zo beschrijven dat je je midden in Londen waant:

For having lived in Westminster — how many years now? over twenty, -- one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed.

First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrell organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June..
For it was the middle of June.

En dan de wijze waarop ze de personages neerzet en hun gedachtewereld blootlegt. Wauw... Lezen hoor, dit boek. Misschien een beetje 'tough' in het begin, maar laat je meevoeren door Woolf en je krijgt er 'op zeker' geen spijt van.