The Waves (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

By SparkNotes

The Waves (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Virginia Woolf
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• Language: English
• Publisher: SparkNotes
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781411478275

Book preview

Cover of SparkNotes Guide to The Waves by SparkNotes Editors

The Waves

Virginia Woolf

© 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7827-5

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Contents

Context

Plot Overview

Character List

Analysis of Major Characters

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Important Quotations Explained

Key Facts

Context

Virginia Woolf was one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, and The Waves (1931) represents, in a career filled with bold experiments, her most audacious exploration of the possibilities of the novel form. The Waves abandons traditional structure and plot as practiced in the English novel since the days of the writer Henry Fielding, in favor of a lyrical, almost dreamlike evocation of character. Instead of narrating her characters’ outward actions, Woolf enters their minds and reports their thoughts and perceptions as they occur, with few external clues to provide shape or context. Woolf builds her characters from the inside out, and one of the concerns of the novel is the way individual personalities and sensibilities are shaped by relationships with others. The resulting work still presents unique challenges and rewards for the reader, even more than fifty years since its publication. Woolf herself, however, worked hard in her lifetime to create an intellectual and critical environment in which such formally adventurous works as The Waves could be understood and appreciated.

Woolf was born in 1882 into an already distinguished literary and artistic family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was one of the most notable intellectuals of his day, and her sister, Vanessa, went on to become a well-regarded painter. Along with her husband, the publisher Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, Woolf became one of the leading figures in the Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers. Named for the London district in which the Woolfs lived, the Bloomsbury Group was an informal circle of writers, artists, and thinkers who formed one of the most well-known branches of the literary avant-garde of