The Waves - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140185623 ISBN 13: 9780140185621

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1992

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"Clear, bright, burnished, at once marvellously accurate and subtly connotative. The pure, delicate sensibility found in this language and the moods that it expresses are a true kind of poetry" (New York Times)

"As a reader, as a writer, I constantly return, for the lyricism of it, the melancholy, the humanity" (Amy Sackville Independent)

Book Description:

This edition will be the most extensive and authoritative, the most fully collated, scrupulously researched and explicated text available to scholars to date, and for considerable time to come. Based on the first edition of Woolf's most challenging novel, this volume is an essential purchase for libraries and scholars.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0140185623
• ISBN 13: 9780140185621
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288