Virginia Woolf 1st US Ed 1931 The Waves 6 Characters in Monologue Hardcover w/DJ

Up For Sale Today is

The Waves

by

Virginia Woolf

Hardcover. 8vo. Published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York. 1931. 297 pgs. First Edition/First Printing.

Vanessa Bell DJ is stained and worn . Bound in blue cloth boards with yellow titles. Boards are lightly rubbed and worn with some sunning present to the spine nick present to the front board. Bookstore label present to the rear board. Text is free of marks, binding tight and solid. 

One of Woolf’s most experimental novels, The Waves presents six characters in monologue - from morning until night, from childhood into old age - against a background of the sea. The result is a glorious chorus of voices that exists not to remark on the passing of events but to celebrate the connection between its various individual parts.

FROM WIKIPEDIA:

The Waves, first published in 1931, is Virginia Woolf's most experimental novel. It consists of soliloquies spoken by the book's six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis. Also important is Percival, the seventh character, though readers never hear him speak in his own voice. The soliloquies that span the characters' lives are broken up by nine brief third-person interludes detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day from sunrise to sunset.

As the six characters or "voices" speak Woolf explores concepts of individuality, self and community. Each character is distinct, yet together they compose (as Ida Klitgård has put it) a gestalt about a silent central consciousness.

The difficulty of assigning genre to this novel is complicated by the fact that The Waves blurs distinctions between prose and poetry, allowing the novel to flow between six not dissimilar interior monologues. The book similarly breaks down boundaries between people, and Woolf herself wrote in her Diary that the six were not meant to be separate "characters" at all, but rather facets of consciousness illuminating a sense of continuity. Even the term "novel" may not accurately describe the complex form of The Waves. as is described in the literary biography of Woolf by Julia Briggs. Woolf herself called it, not a novel, but a "playpoem".

The book also explores the role of the "ethos of male education" in shaping public life, and includes scenes of some of the characters experiencing bullying during their first days at school.