The Waves (Wordsworth Classics) [Paperback]

Full of sensuous touches...the sounds of her words can be velvet on the page (Maggie Gee Daily Telegraph ) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

'Virginia Woolf wanted to write about the vast unknown uncertain continent that is the world and us in it' Jeanette Winterson, from her introduction to The Waves --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

This Wordsworth Edition includes an exclusive Introduction and Notes by Deborah Parsons, University of Birmingham.

'I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot', Virginia Woolf stated of her eighth novel, The Waves. Widely regarded as one of her greatest and most original works, it conveys the rhythms of life in synchrony with the cycle of nature and the passage of time. Six children - Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis - meet in a garden close to the sea, their voices sounding over the constant echo of the waves that roll back and forth from the shore. The subsequent continuity of these six main characters, as they develop from childhood to maturity and follow different passions and ambitions, is interspersed with interludes from the timeless and unifying chorus of nature.

In pure stream-of-consciousness style, Woolf presents a cross-section of multiple yet parallel lives, each marked by the disintegrating force of a mutual tragedy. The Waves is her searching exploration of individual and collective identity, and the observations and emotions of life, from the simplicity and surging optimism of youth to the vacancy and despair of middle-age.

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Tracing the lives of a group of six friends, The Waves follows
their development from childhood to youth and middle age. While their
individual achievements and disappointments form its narrative, this novel
is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that conveys the inner
lives 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, in a
haunting, atmospheric and sensuous exploration of the complexities of human
experience. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

The most intense and experimental of Virginia Woolf's works, 'The Waves' traces the lives of a group of friends from the extraordinary immediacy of childhood through to the detachment of middle age. The personalities and daily lives of Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis are evoked through their reflections on themselves and on each other, emphasising the inner consciousness rather than external events.

A key modernist text, 'The Waves' shows Virginia Woolf bringing the language of prose closer to that of poetry in order to convey the true intensity of the shifting impressions and sensations which make up an individual's awareness. In a beautifully orchestrated pattern of recurring phrases and images, echoing the ebb and flow of experience, Virginia Woolf brought her mastery of thought and technique to its ultimate point.

One of the dominant images of the novel, used by the writer, Bernard, is that of a fin breaking from the water; this was, as Woolf's diary reveals, her starting point for the work ('One sees a fin passing far out', 30 September 1926). On 7 February 1931, having just written the last words of the book, she recorded in her diary, 'I have netted that fin…'

“An extraordinary achievement… her greatest book”
E.M. FORSTER

“A book of great beauty and a prose poem of genius.”
STEPHEN SPENDER

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. From 1915, when she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary criticism, essays and biography. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917 they founded The Hogarth Press. Virginia Woolf suffered a series of mental breakdowns throughout her life, and on 28 March 1941 she committed suicide.