“There is no disillusionment in [Woolf’s] work, but, instead of that, a fine realization of the intrinsic beauty of life and a dominant sympathy with her characters…the reader must feel that Jacob has been victorious in his brief wrestling with life.”

“[Wanda McCaddon] reads Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness…with such force and authority that gradually, in the poetry of these images, a character, albeit somewhat lost and stillborn, breaks through into a hollow world, exactly as Woolf intended. It is the narrator’s assurance, as it was the writer’s belief before her, that this stream of consciousness cataloging would produce both world and character, and so it does.”

“Mrs. Woolf is a considerable writer, and plays tricks with a fine literary sense…Perhaps she will yet convince us that this is the way to write novels or one of the ways. One would like to read another book of hers when she has returned to convention. Or, perhaps, even before.” 

“The coherence of the book is even more amazing than its beauty. In the stream of glittering similes, unfinished sentences, hectic catalogues, and unanchored proper names, we seem to be going nowhere. Yet the goal comes, the method and the matter prove to have been one, and looking back from the pathos of the closing scene, we see for a moment the airy drifting atoms piled into a colonnade.”