The Waves

byVirginia Woolf, Frances Spalding (Introducer)
The Waves has been hailed as Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece. It interweaves the voices of six characters, three boys and three girls, beginning with their childhood in a garden by the sea and following them throughout their lives. As the six grow up they experience friendships and loves, triumphs and regrets, and they grieve for the death of a seventh character, their beloved friend Percival.

Interspersed throughout their interior monologues, and unifying them, are brief
scenes of the seaside that progress from dawn to sunset of a single day. Defying
classification, Woolf’s novel boldly breaks down the barriers between poetry and prose, as well as those between the consciousnesses of her individual characters, producing an entrancing and groundbreaking work of literature
It is most rarely subtle. It has seen more deeply into the human heart, perhaps, than even to the Lighthouse.
Winifred Holtby

About Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.
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