The Waves (Oxford World's Classics)

by Gillian Beer (Editor), Gillian Beer (Editor), Virginia Woolf (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.90

  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. The Waves was conceived, brooded on, and written during a highly political phase in Woolf's career, when she was 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. The work is often described as if it were the product of a secluded, disembodied sensibility. Yet its writing is supremely engaged and engaging, providing an experience which the reader is unlikely to forget.

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $3.43

  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

  $3.70

  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
  1978

  $18.63