How to tell if you’re in a Virginia Woolf novel

(Ripping off Mallory Ortberg’s brilliant series on The Toast.)

You’re in a Virginia Woolf novel if…

You have a little spaniel who paws at your feet and looks at you, full of meaning and uncomplicated desire; rushing, whimpering, careening toward the day’s promise.
There she was, from the very first, perhaps from all time, an old woman — watching you from her bedroom window. She inhales. You exhale. A streetcar rushes past and the fabric of time falters and wrinkles, and you know that there shall never be a day quite like this one.
A man keeps opening and closing a pocketknife in your presence. You feel sexually harassed but can never say so.
Women alone stir your imagination.
Your husband is well educated and clueless. You exchange many portentous glances with him over your scones and tea.
There are flowers in a vase. What do they mean?
You are a middle-aged rich woman oppressed by the narrowness of your life and the mediocrity of your marriage.
A white gown is draped over a chair; the purple bloom of the passion flower casts a shadow over the windowsill; the bird calls and the day ends.
You have many children and you’re not sure what to do with them all.
Marriage is an island and husbands and wives are castaways.
You shall be like your mother; silent and hands folded in a blue apron, looking up and down the corridors.
There is a garden, and there is a river, and there is a vacant parlor.
You’re having an argument with an intimate that occurs solely through the exchange of raised eyebrows, meaningful glances, and arms lifted and lowered in evocative ways.
Your husband has a mind that runs like keys on a piano, up and down the scales, through an alphabet; ravaging and consuming knowledge; it locks you out; you upbraid it.
You throw a party that is a symbol of all of your deepest, unspoken desires, an orchestrated mutiny against the prison you occupy as a wealthy white British woman.
That is your mother. Yes, Paul should look at her. Yes, Minta should look at her. That is the thing itself, you feel.
You are the mystical doppelganger of a man you have never met.
You die in a parenthetical remark.