Virginia Woolf 5: The Waves

We thought we’d be concluding our Virginia Woolf deep-dive with "A Room of One’s Own," but we’ve enjoyed this series so much we decided to extend. Today we’re looking at the book which many Woolf obsessives consider her masterpiece. Woolf published The Waves in 1931, just two years after her string of masterpieces, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and “A Room of One’s Own.” As Sophie and Jonty will tell you, it’s the Big Chill – or the Breakfast Club – of Woolf’s oevre. A story about a group of friends who go through their lives in and out of contact with one another, sharing many of their most profound and important experiences.

The sensation of reading The Waves is rather like being a pebble on a beach, rolled around by the waves of Woolf’s creative genius - not always knowing what is going on. While it's hugely brilliant, we think most readers will need a floatation device to help them cope with the swell of this experimental, unconventional narrative. To be our Virginia Woolf “life raft in residence” we invited Woolf scholar and all-round excellent writer and critic Alexandra Harris back onto the show to explain to us why The Waves is the novel that serious Virginia Woolf fans can't live without.

And don’t miss Alexandra’s own wonderful books, especially her recent The Rising Down, a beautiful and moving account of the Sussex landscape, and the lives and histories it contains within it.

Books by Alexandra Harris:

The Rising Down: Lives in a Landscape (Faber, 2024)

Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (Thames and Hudson, 2015)

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists & the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (Thames and Hudson, 2010)

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