“The past only comes back‘, wrote Virginia Woolf in her unfinished memoir, “when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths“. I confess, I am a huge fan of Virginia Woolf, the English writer who is considered to be one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century and essentially (to me) a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. I ‘discovered’ Woolf’s work as a young girl, long before my eldest son attended boarding school, in Lewes, where she died, drowning herself in the River Ouse, not…