The Waves

Virginia Woolf · 1931 CE · Novel · English · Modernist

Six voices speak in turn from a shared childhood garden through school, work, marriage and age, each in a formal soliloquy addressed to nobody, with nothing narrated in between. Italic interludes track the sun across a stretch of sea from before dawn to after dark, one for each stage of the lives; a seventh figure, Percival, never speaks and holds the others together by being loved. Woolf called it a playpoem, and it is the furthest she went from narrative of any kind.

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