Preface

Summary

The Waves is Virginia Woolf's most formidable and challenging work of art. She herself regarded it as ‘the most difficult and complex’ of her books, and few readers since its publication in 1931 have dissented from this judgement. In this, her seventh major work of fiction, she took that passion for experiment which created the great novels of her middle career to its ‘furthest development so far’, and the result is unique, both within her own oeuvre and the larger tradition of English fiction itself. Her most formally inventive fiction, The Waves appears to owe its inspiration more to poetry and drama than the novel, as six speakers engage in a ceaseless round of monologues or ‘soliloquies’ about the course and development of their lives. Here Woolf freely manipulated conventional elements of fiction – plot, character, narrative – in a concerted attempt to take the novel beyond its customary compass. The results have been predictable, and shared by many modernist works of art: intense admiration by a few is balanced against extreme bafflement on the part of the common reader. Many have felt that the work in some sense goes too far, evolving beyond the bounds of what one can recognizably call a novel. Yet one of the many paradoxes of The Waves is that its difficulties are deceptive, to some extent superficial; once past the initial challenge of the form one finds many links with the rest of Woolf's art, as indeed with the novel itself.