The Waves

297 pp. A study of six childhood friends as they grow into very different adults, by the feminist author and publisher known for Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own, etc. She and her husband Leonard founded The Hogarth Press, and they were both members of The Bloomsbury Group, a literary society composed of numerous important intellectuals and writers of the time. "Virginia Woolf's most daring novel, The Waves (1931), has not yet had its due. Its ‘framework of steel' invents a revolutionary treatment of the lifespan. Here the writer is at her furthest remove from the traditional biographic schema, the public highway from pedigree to grave. Not only are there no pedigrees in The Waves; there are no placing surnames and no society to speak of, for here she explores the genetic givens of existence, unfolding what is innate in human nature against the backdrop of what is permanent in nature: sun and sea. A writer called Bernard wishes, he tells his reader, 'to give you my life'. That life, like those of his five friends, is composed in each case around a defining phrase—'a limpet clinging to a rock' or 'the nymph of the fountain, always wet'—which gives a life its internal coherence. Compared with this, the set form of the lifespan—the chronology of birth, school, mating, death—is, says Bernard, 'a convenience, a lie' because it does not see, beneath the platform of public action, the half-finished sentences and half-discernible acts on which life turns. The diagram of the lifespan allows parallel lives to reach their apogee at any one of nine phases from childhood to old age. Part of Virginia Woolf's greatness lay in her continuation of Henry James's aim to define the novel as a form of art. She fulfils its inherent flexibility when she blends the novel with other genres to create new forms: where The Waves is a poem–novel, The Years (1937) is an essay–novel, and Between the Acts (1941) a drama–novel. Her flair for experiment remained at the ready throughout her life: as she brought a great work to completion, she would see, on her horizon, another wave rising, far out." - Oxford Dictionary of National Biography