In the Library
The Waves
Virginia Woolf, 1931
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 5.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 9
- Length
- Length 77k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
This edition is still in copyright in the United States, so it cannot be bought there.
The first button opens the book in the app when it is installed; the badge gets the app.
Still in copyright in the United States: this edition is sold and read outside it.
Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read The Waves
A book whose reputation as the hardest, most plotless thing Woolf ever wrote keeps people away from what is really six private minds talking aloud from childhood to old age, and once you stop hunting for a story it becomes the most absorbing of her books.
You have probably heard that The Waves is the book where Virginia Woolf finally went too far, the one with no plot, no scenes you can picture, and six characters you cannot tell apart, all of them speaking in the same impossibly refined poetry. Most of that reputation is true and yet it has frightened off readers for the wrong reason, because the difficulty is not a wall to climb so much as a different way of listening you can settle into within a few pages. What you are actually opening is the inner life of six friends, given to you straight from the inside, with everything that usually fills a novel quietly stripped away so that only the consciousness remains.
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About the book
Between every chapter the sun climbs and sinks over an empty shore and the waves come in, over and over, indifferent to the six lives unfolding in the spaces between. Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis speak only in soliloquy, never once to each other, carrying their separate minds from the smell of a childhood garden to the weariness of old age. The book withholds almost everything a novel promises, no scenes, no dialogue, no narrator to tell you what to feel, and hands back something stranger and finer: the pure rhythm of being alive, six consciousnesses beating like one tide. When Percival, the seventh, the friend who never speaks, falls from his horse in India, his death reaches each of them as a separate wound, and you understand that love can go on existing as the shape of an absence. Rhoda, who says she has no face and no self to gather, carries the novel's terror; Bernard, at the last, flings himself at death unvanquished, pulling all six voices into one final charge against the dark.