How could I possibly have understood Mrs. Dalloway when I read it in college?

Yesterday I started (re)reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and what amazes me the most is that I actually read this novel in college (and then again much later, maybe 30 years ago?). I could not possibly have understood it when I was in college; in fact, I must have read through it quickly, looking only for the essence of the plot – a London woman prepares for a give a dinner party; the first line, in fact, is something about Mrs. D’s buying flowers – and I probably thought, who cares?, what a trivial novel. And looking at it now – I read about 70 pp or roughly the first third of the novel – there is so much in this complex, subtle work, much more than I could possibly have recognized or understood. How could my class – it was a course in the “modern” British novel, lectures by a famous scholar, the actual teaching done by grad students – have understood this book? We were young – and we were all guys. I am certain that the class discussions never talking about feminism, women’s suffrage and suffering, Lesbian love – all key themes in this book – that a group of 20-year-old guys way back then could possibly recognize (I am pretty sure this was one of only 2 works of fiction by a woman novelist that I read in any course in college, the other being Wuthering Heights). So just based on the first third of the novel we see Clarissa Dalloway’s unhappiness in her marriage (to Richard, some kind of indifferent government minister), her sorrow at the fate of her multiply married and unhappy friend who’d at one time proposed to her (Peter), her memories of her sexual dalliances with her friend Sally, the comfort of her life – wealth, social status – and her sense of the trivialities of her life and her wasted opportunities, the oddness of the skywriting airplane noticed by people across London, her brush against the mentally ill and suicidal Septimus, her difficult relationship w/ servants, the near invisibility of her daughter – so much; it’s a feminist novel of course, though w/out polemics or didactics, but also a personal tragedy and a portrait of a society still wracked by the first World War, and w/ smoldering class resentments that just lightly brush up against the lives of the protected class.