SHARAFF/SZE COLLECTION
The Waves (1931)
Virginia Woolf
During the two years it took Virginia Woolf to complete The Waves, the demands of Hogarth Press, social pleasures and duties, even the noise of a jazz band in a nearby hotel, interfered with her work. Scattered through Woolf's journals and letters from 1929 to 1932 are frequent references to the novel she found compelling, at times agonizing, to write.
Virginia Woolf, the English novelist and essayist, first conceived of The Waves (original title: The Moths) as she was finishing To the Lighthouse. One of the most innovative stream-of-consciousness novelists of the twentieth century, Woolf considered The Waves as "prose yet poetry; a novel & a play." She also described it as her "first work in my own style."
The complexity of the plot strained Woolf's energies. The Waves traces the lives of a group of friends from childhood to late middle age, revealing their personalities through their reflections on themselves and one another. The main text is divided by sections describing the rising and setting of the sun over the waves. In her diary she wrote "Never have I screwed my brain so tight over a book." The 200 words she produced after one morning's work, she wrote to David Garnett, were "crazy as broken china."
On February 7, 1931, Woolf recorded her exalted feelings as she completed the novel. "I wrote the words 0 Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity & intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice."
In her writing hut in the garden of Monk's House, Woolf waited for her husband's opinion. Leonard Woolf proclaimed it a masterpiece. But she was delighted when Vita Sackville-West found the novel .so bad that only a small dog that had been fed on gin could have written it." After his wife's suicide by drowning in 1941, Leonard Woolf had inscribed on a tablet in the garden where her ashes lay buried the final words of The Waves: "Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, 0 Death!"
|