Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

I read this as preparation for reading Michael Cunningham's 'The Hours', and must confess that it took so much concentration that it felt a little like doing homework... Virginia Woolf is an author that I've always wanted to like, but never really managed to. I'm not even sure exactly why - perhaps because her approach has been so influential that it no longer has the same impact? I suspect that as someone who often picks up a book in order to be immersed in someone else's world to drown out my own inner monologue for a while, I just find it too challenging to be confronted with other people's! Strangely, for me the book started to feel less depressing at around the point that the shell-shocked Septimus committed suicide.