The Waves
‘The Waves’ by an English writer, who is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and also a pioneer in the use of the stream of consciousness as a narrative device, Virginia Woolf. It is an experimental novel that is considered a key text of the Modernist literary movement. Interspersed with lyrical descriptions of waves breaking against the shoreline, the novel traces the intertwining lives of six friends from childhood to old age, with each character telling their own story in their own words, in the form of extended soliloquies. The novel’s unusual structure, poetic prose, and use of the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique made it groundbreaking for its time, and it is considered a classic of 20th-century English literature. Innovative and deeply poetic, it is often regarded as Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece. "There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'." — Virginia Woolf (The Waves)
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About the Author
Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid.
With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.
Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).
Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, and selections from her essays and short stories.