From Richard Eder's review of Edward Mendelson's The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life:

"His prismatic evocations of the Mrs. Dalloway who is defined by her position, obligations and party preparations and her inner Clarissa — that essential being she glimpses for a moment at the end, thanks to the suicide of Septimus and the steadfast love of her childhood friend, Peter — implant the life and breath of one masterpiece in a masterly work of criticism. The same magic is worked with Mrs. Ramsay in “Lighthouse.”"

It was a pleasant review, and the book sounds perhaps worth reading, but the first sentence of this paragraph seems very wrong. The essential Clarissa is defined by her party preparations; if anything the two novels offer a critique of the notion that there's an invisible world that matters, and a visible world that's mere illusion. Clarissa's party matters to her, and to think so is to embrace life (after her long illness). In contrast, Peter's impatience with convention is the root of his unhappiness, and while he no doubt thinks he suffers for some truth, we know he's simply wrong. ("We know": I can't speak for everyone. But I was very convinced of this when I read it.) There's more to frivolity than meets the eye.

Likewise, in To the Lighthouse "This is a table, this is a chair, this is an ecstasy, this is a miracle." — this is what Lily Briscoe knows. Only a pathetic person like Mr. Ramsay's student would think that the visible world is an illusion.

There are moments (in To the Lighthouse & in the essays) when ordinary people fleetingly seem archetypical. But this is because the colors of the visible world brighten and deepen, not because we see through any veil of illusion (which seems, frankly, an anti-literary impulse.)

Maybe I'm overreacting, maybe Mr. Eder meant nothing in particular by that sentence. I don't, unfortunately, have Woolf's novels at hand (otherwise I would quote at length), but I've just read Annie Dillard, who quotes Teilhard de Chardin: "The souls of men form, in some manner, the incandescent surface of matter plunged in God."… '"Plunge into matter," Teilhard said — and at another time, "Plunge into God." And he said this fine thing: "By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers."…There is only matter, Teilhard said; there is only spirit, the Kabbalists and Gnostics said. These are essentially identical views.'

I've just finished reading this, so I'm alert to suggestions of dualism.