Older than Evelyn Waugh by a couple of decades, Virginia Woolfs treatment of a similar social milieu to that of Waugh is markedly different. He wrote of a world in a state of constant transition, whereas her work is an elegy on lifestyles that seemed to slip away almost by accident.

Her principle theme is time, its relentless passing, and the changes it brings in people and in relationships, while attitudes and emotions continue to endure. I have a memory of a book in which she writes how Tuesday follows Monday; Wednesday, Tuesday', a memory that stuck in my mind for more than forty years, until I thought to check it before writing this, and found that, in fact, she had written ‘After Monday comes Tuesday, and Wednesday follows’. The cycle is relentless, our position in it akin to the not quite still, but nevertheless constant centre of a moving world.

Those lines came from The Waves, to my mind a far more effective use of personal narration than Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Ulysses. Virginia Woolf deals with six friends, moving from childhood to age, some dropping away, speaking initially in sentences that capture the wonder of new experience – ‘When the smoke rises, sleep curls off the roof like a mist,’ said Louis, supposedly based on T. S. Eliot.