I am not sure why I chose to read this at this phase of life, but the intuition was correct. It strikes me now as being somewhat in the vein of Joyce's The Dead. Fiction that speaks to me now, I think, is that which is a hard fought struggle to recover, and perhaps redeem, something, as this assuredly is. Not exactly a roman a clef, but much about Woolf's family is in it. Mrs Ramsey is Woolf's mother. It is a glorious and strange novel in which almost nothing happens.