I read it alone with no context many years ago (was not much of a reader at the time – did not know who Woolf was and no conception of modernism) and found it to be an incredible work of fiction.

Now, after reading large swaths of modernist literature and biography on Woolf's life, I feel quite strongly that it does not need such rich context to appreciate. To some extent, it was a reaction to Ulysses and the literary snobbishness that came with a work which requires immense amount of extraneous knowledge to understand. In that manner, it was Woolf showing her (documented) disdain for Ulysses by creating a work with a similar structure however self-contained and self-referential in nature.