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The Waves: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition Kindle Edition

by Virginia Woolf (Author), Mark Hussey (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 878 ratings

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“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”

Innovative and deeply poetic, The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece. It begins with six children—three boys and three girls—playing in a garden by the sea, and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing their inner lives: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation.

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	Mrs. Dalloway	To the Lighthouse	A Room of One's Own	Orlando	Three Guineas	Between the Acts

Customer Reviews	4,757	3,465	4,622	1,473	97	254
Price	$7.69	$7.89	$10.99	$13.59	$9.99	$18.04

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About the Author

Virginia Woolf was a novelist, cultural critic and publisher and the author of such groundbreaking novels as To the Lighthouse, The Years and Mrs Dalloway. Woolf is one of the most important and innovative writers of the 20th century and her essays include the canonical feminist text A Room of One's Own.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004R1Q41C
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books Classics (January 1, 1950)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 1, 1950
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2728 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 230 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,001,496 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #971 in Classic British & Irish Fiction
- #1,113 in Classic American Fiction
- #2,586 in Classic American Literature

Customer Reviews:
4.5 878 ratings

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Virginia Woolf
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Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid.
With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.
Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).
Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, and selections from her essays and short stories.
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General Press
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General Press publishes high-quality POD books in almost all popular genres including Fiction, Nonfiction, Religion, Self-Help, Romance, Classics, etc.
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4.5 out of 5

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Phil Clapham

Unique in English literature... if you love language, read this book

Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2014

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I have been a devoted fan of Virginia Woolf since I was a teenager and first discovered the brilliance of her writing in "To The Lighthouse"... after which I devoured everything she had written, including her diaries and essays. There is nothing else like The Waves in the whole of English literature, before or since. The best summary of it I have ever heard was the author Jeanette Winterson's comment that it represented "a 200-page insult to mediocrity". Indeed it does.

Six characters, followed from childhood to old age, narrating what they see, think and feel, always in the present tense. As with her other novels, Woolf's insights into the individual's inner realm of emotion and thought are keen and complex. But the true magic of the book lies in the writing and the way all this is expressed. The language is uniquely lyrical; Woolf's words almost paint pictures on the page.

This is not to say that The Waves is for everyone. So try this simple test: pick it off the shelf in a bookstore and read the first dozen or so pages. You will likely have one of two reactions: either that it is extraordinary, magical prose poetry, or a less prosaic "Huh?" If you're in the latter category, don't read the rest... and if you're still curious about Woolf, start with To The Lighthouse or Mrs Dalloway, both of which are more conventional in their form (though Woolf's work can rarely be termed conventional).

I return to this book every few years as I myself advance in age and can relate more directly to a different part of the characters' lives. The old dinner party question about which three or four books one would take to a desert island finds, for me, one of its answers here in this wonderful, unique novel (for the record, the others would be Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, some good trash - maybe James Clavell's "Shogun" - and an anthology of poetry of my own choosing).

45 people found this helpful

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PhotoMan

First Woolf I’ve Read - Best Book in Ages!

Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2023

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I was concerned at the outset, the style of writing beong quite unconventional, even by today’s standards. Then, I fell in love woth the book. Truly writing as an art form. I am so happy I found this book.

6 people found this helpful

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Brian C.

A semi-successful experiment...

Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2020

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For the first 50 or 100 pages of The Waves I was enthralled. Late in the novel Woolf has a character muse on the blurry outlines of our everyday consciousness where there is a "rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights...There is nothing one can fish up in a spoon; nothing one can call an event. Yet it is alive too and deep, this stream" (255-256). Woolf has set herself the task of describing six lives from the standpoint of this stream which can never truly be captured in language and the novel is at times revelatory. One learns a lot about oneself reading this book.

However, it is difficult to sustain for 300 pages. While there are priceless gems scattered throughout the whole book after 50 or 100 pages it becomes a bit repetitive and tedious and I found myself longing for the surface. It just felt like too much to be submerged in this stream for 300 straight pages. I think in general there needs to be rhythm in works of fiction. If there is a climax there also have to be duller sections and periods of build up and return. If there are revelations or epiphanies they need to be separated by periods of routine. If there is profound poetry there also need to be sections of plain prose. This novel seemed to me to be an attempt at pure poetry, every line made an attempt to be deep and profound, every moment needed to give birth to some new epiphany, and it is too much. We lose the rhythm of the waves and of life. The novel was missing the rhythmic returns to normalcy that are necessary to highlight the moments of exceptional clarity and beauty.

There are lots of interesting themes in the novel involving the nature of identity, the self, language, consciousness, and so on and there are some tremendously beautiful lines and insights that I will return to over the years so the book is worth reading. It is also a tremendous feat to have written this book and I have the utmost respect and admiration for Woolf for not only attempting it but succeeding as well as anyone possibly could. But I don't think the experiment was ultimately entirely successful. We cannot live in the stream. We can dive occasionally and bring back a pearl or a shiny rock but we also need to breathe the air and forget about the stream for extended periods of time. While I gathered some pearls along the way, and am grateful for them, by the time I finished the book I was ready for some fresh air.

53 people found this helpful

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Mark

Literary genius

Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2013

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The Waves is an extraordinary book, narrated by the wind that swirls around a family and their beach home for decades. I have never read another book where a natural force, like the wind, narrates, but the literary device is so very effective as the wind presents the family with no prejudices - just as an observer that really is a part of the family and at the same time, has distance that allows for pure observation. To me, one of the most important books in English literature. The device does not feel like a device. At first, it is hard to understand where the narration is coming from - as the book starts with the wind narrating. But easily, as one reads further, one falls into pace with that wind, which is so unsentimental that a certain purity of observation is achieved. Really amazing.

7 people found this helpful

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CiscoD

A brilliant book, full of typographic glitches not Virginia Woolf's.

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2017

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It is, of course, a brilliant experimental novel by one of the greatest minds of English literature. Not for everyone, but the writing is astonishing. Its reputation and Woolf's are well established. I'm only writing this review to have the opportunity to complain about the Kindle edition, which was clearly scanned and never thereafter edited, so it's full of glitches that thump and bump the reader like potholes. One pauses and wonders did she mean "Ups" or "lips?" Of course, it's obvious, but why have to guess? The book must be pure profit at this point. It's embarrassing that the publisher had no more pride in their work than this. Still, a fine read.

21 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

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Berenice

Excelente

Reviewed in Mexico on January 2, 2024

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Obviamente la calidad de la autora se refleja en todas sus obras.

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vk

Nice.

Reviewed in India on July 17, 2022

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SassyShopper48

Re: Recommended book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 7, 2021

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This is the first time l've ever read a book by Virginia Woolf, it is certainly different to other books l have read. A friend explained the book to me and then it made more sense - you're reading their thoughts not a conversation, once l knew that it made reading easier and l have enjoyed the book. Would recommend this book/author to other readers. Other book l purchased at the same time was Whose's afraid of Virginia Woolf - next to read.......

Amazon Customer

Waves

Reviewed in Canada on May 24, 2019

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Deceptive title. Not really about waves. 10/10

Micky

Gut

Reviewed in Germany on July 9, 2020

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Schöne Ausgabe