The Waves (World's Classics)

by VirginiaWoolf (Author), Gillian Beer (Editor)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1992

  $3.91

  Woolf described this work on the title-page of the first draft as the life of anybody . The Waves (1931) traces the lives and interactions of seven friends in an exploratory and sensuous narrative. It was conceived, brooded on, and written during a highly political phase in Woolf's career, when she was engaged in speaking on issues of gender and of class. This was also the period when her love affair with Vita Sackville-West was at its most intense.

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $3.53

  On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway, the glittering wife of a Member of Parliament, is preparing for a grand party that evening. As she walks through London, buying flowers, observing life, her thoughts are in the past, and she remembers the time when she was as young as her own daughter Elizabeth; her romance with Peter Walsh, now recently returned from India; and the friends of her youth. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is being driven mad by shell shock. As the day draws to its end, his world and Clarissa's collide in unexpected ways.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1992

  $4.97

  2013 Reprint of 1931 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. The Waves, first published in 1931, is Virginia Woolf's most experimental novel. It consists of soliloquies spoken by the book's six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis. Also important is Percival, the seventh character, though readers never hear him speak through his own voice. The soliloquies that span the characters' lives are broken up by nine brief third-person interludes detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day from sunrise to sunset. As the six characters or voices alternately speak, Woolf explores concepts of individuality, self, and community. Each character is distinct, yet together they compose a gestalt about a silent central consciousness. The novel follows its six narrators from childhood through adulthood. Woolf's novel is concerned with the individual consciousness and the ways in which multiple consciousnesses can weave together. The difficulty of assigning genre to this novel is complicated by the fact that The Waves blurs distinctions between prose and poetry, allowing the novel to flow between six not dissimilar interior monologues. The book similarly breaks down boundaries between people, and Woolf herself wrote in her Diary that the six were not meant to be separate characters at all, but rather facets of consciousness illuminating a sense of continuity.

• New

  Paperback
  2000

  $10.55

  A formally innovative work of modernist fiction, Virginia Woolf's The Waves is edited with an introduction by Kate Flint in Penguin Modern Classics . More than any of Virginia Woolf's other novels, The Waves conveys the full complexity and richness of human experience. Tracing the lives of a group of friends, The Waves follows their development from childhood to youth and middle age. While social events, individual achievements and disappointments form its narrative, the novel is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that expresses the inner life of its characters: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation. Separately and together, they query the relationship of past to present, and the meaning of life itself. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and the centre of The Bloomsbury Group . This informal collective of artists and writers, which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry , exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. If you enjoyed The Waves , you might like Woolf's Mrs Dalloway , also available in Penguin Classics . A book of great beauty and a prose poem of genius. ( Stephen Spender ). Full of sensuous touches...the sounds of her words can be velvet on the page. (Maggie Gee, Daily Telegraph ).