Times Review of The Waves 1931

The Diary Volume 4, Thursday 8 October, 1931

"Really, this unintelligible book is being better 'received' than any of them. A note in The Times proper - the first time this has been allowed me. And it sells - how unexpected, how odd that people can read that difficult grinding stuff!".

This is, of course, referring to the publication of The Waves. An excerpt from The Times, 9 October 1931 says: 'Like some old Venetian craftsman in glass, Mrs Woolf spins the coloured threads, and with exquisite, intuitive sensibility fashions ethereal frailties of enduring quality'.

The Waves stands as my favourite Woolf book alongside Mrs Dalloway.

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My Woolf year has begun

2013 is underway and I am currently reading: Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, The Voyage Out and The Waves.

I am reading these all in eBook format, which allows me to search, annotate and get definitions from the text. Now I have the 9 novels in electronic format I plan to do some word comparisons which are very tedious in the ordinary book format. I will share the results here.

Reading of The Waves at Yahoo Groups

I am the moderator of the Virginia Woolf group at Yahoo. We are starting a read of The Waves in the New Year. Feel free to join us. Go to http://groups.yahoo.com and search for Virginia Woolf.

Flush

I have finally finished VW's novel Flush and I loved it. Very whimsical and light but so accurate in capturing the mannerisms of the Spaniel breed. The breadth of VW's writings is huge from The Waves through to Flush.

Has anyone seen an edition or transcript where the Waves is broken down by person and you can read one strand through in its entirety? I was thinking that reading it in such a way may shed some light. I'm reading it for the second time in "ordinary" mode but felt that a new view is always interesting.

A Radical Approach to Reality in To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf takes a radical departure from the Victorian novel in her book To the Lighthouse. Victorian novels tend to see stories from a single character’s perspective or in the tradition of the Victorian novelists from the author’s own perspective. 

Toward the end of the novel, Lily reflects that in order to see Mrs. Ramsay character completely—she would need at least fifty pairs of eyes; only then would she understand  every possible angle and nuance. The accumulation of different, even opposing vantage points provides an aggregate truth. The story supports Lily’s assertion. The world is created by an accumulation of perceptions.

This experimentation and description of the aggregated inner thoughts and minds of the characters is new and daring and is further developed in The Waves.