Introduction

Summary

Shortly after the publication of her 1931 novel The Waves, Virginia Woolf received a letter of admiration from her friend and fellow member of the Bloomsbury Group, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. In his letter, Dickinson specifically commented on the novel’s affinities with science. The Waves, he wrote, ‘makes clearer to me what literature really is. It’s not (as it is so often in fact) a kind of antithesis to science. It’s science made alive.’ The present book shares Dickinson’s insight that Woolf’s novels resonate with the language and conceptions of contemporary science. More specifically, it demonstrates the importance of science to Woolf’s modernist depictions of identity – to her conception of selfhood as a multiple, expansive entity.