The Waves

Description

Woolf's innovative modernist novel Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this novel follows their development from childhood to middle age. While social events, individual achievements and disappointments form its narrative, the novel is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that expresses the inner life of its characters- their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation. Separately and together, they query the relationship of past to present, and the meaning of life itself.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist, essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Her family and friends were writers and artists and they later became known as the Bloomsbury Group. Woolf suffered mental health problems throughout her life and, fearing another outbreak of mental illness, drowned herself in 1941.