The Waves

Nine sections and one day at the sea

The book has nine sections. Each opens with a short passage in italics about a house, a garden and a beach. The passages follow the sun through a single day, from an hour before it rises to after it sets. Around them, the friends' speeches follow their lives from early childhood to the edge of death.

Every speech is tagged the same way: said Bernard, said Susan, said Rhoda. Nobody talks the way people really talk. Herbert Marder, a Woolf biographer, points out that even as small children the six speak in fully adult voices. The friends almost never answer one another directly. Trudi Tate, who lectures on Woolf, says reading it can feel eerily like dreaming.

Woolf knew the book had no plot in the usual sense. On 2 September 1930 she wrote in her diary that she was writing The Waves "to a rhythm not to a plot." On the manuscript's title page she tried other names for it, among them "the life of anybody" and "life in general."

Percival, the friend who never speaks

Woolf's older brother Thoby Stephen died of typhoid fever in 1906, when she was twenty-four. He had fallen ill after a trip to Greece, and the doctors did not recognise the disease until too late. Herbert Marder writes that The Waves grew out of her thinking about that death, and calls Percival her idealized image of Thoby.

In the novel Percival dies in India, thrown from a horse that stumbles. Bernard notes that he was twenty-five and should have lived to be eighty. Later Louis puts it another way: "he died in Egypt; he died in Greece; all deaths are one death."

Percival never gets a speech of his own. The reader only sees him through the others. In chapel he sits upright with blue, oddly blank eyes, and flicks his hand to the back of his neck. The smaller boys copy the gesture and cannot get it right. At the farewell dinner Bernard imagines him in India, setting a stuck bullock cart right in five minutes while a crowd treats him like a god. The scene is Bernard's fantasy of an English hero abroad, and the novel lets it stand as his.

Each friend takes the news differently. Neville holds the telegram and refuses to climb the stairs. Bernard cannot tell which is sorrow and which is joy, because his son is born the same day. Rhoda walks down Oxford Street in disgust at the crowds, and ends the afternoon throwing violets into the water at Greenwich.

Six voices, and perhaps one person

At the first dinner Bernard calls the red carnation on the table a seven-sided flower, one side for each of them. At Hampton Court, years after Percival's death, he says it has become a six-sided flower, made of six lives. Near the end he goes further: "For this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny or Rhoda".

Herbert Marder reads the six as parts of Woolf herself, each partly drawn from someone close to her. In his reading, Louis takes traits from her husband Leonard Woolf, Neville from the writer Lytton Strachey, and Susan from her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. Jinny's name echoes Ginny, her father Leslie Stephen's pet name for Virginia. Bernard, the storyteller, carries echoes of talkers like Desmond MacCarthy and E. M. Forster.

Those links are one biographer's reading, not labels printed in the book. The characters also stand for plain choices about how to live. Susan wants the land and her children. Jinny wants the next person to cross the room towards her. Neville wants one lover and a closed door. Louis wants order and respect. Rhoda wants to escape other people altogether. Bernard wants the phrase that will hold all of it.

Paris in The Waves, and The Waves in Paris

Paris turns up in the novel only at the edges. On the train home from school, Louis lists where the other boys are headed: Oxford or Cambridge, Edinburgh, Rome, Paris, Berlin, or an American university. He is going to make money. At college Neville teases Bernard for trying on famous writers' personalities. He predicts that Bernard will visit Paris in the Easter vacation and come back in a black tie. Later Louis, now a rising businessman, gives orders by telephone to Paris, Berlin and New York.

The Paris sentence also holds the novel's one unsolved textual puzzle. In the first edition Neville says Bernard will come back "wearing a black tie some detestable Frenchman whom nobody has ever heard of." Edward Mendelson, a Columbia University scholar who has compared the proofs and first editions, thinks one or more words are missing. The surviving drafts give no clue. An editor at Harcourt, Brace pencilled "like" into the American proofs, with a question mark, but the word was never printed.

Paris returns on the last pages. Bernard, old and tired after dinner with a near-stranger, loses track of where he is: "Is it Paris, is it London where we sit, or some southern city of pink-washed houses lying under cypresses, under high mountains, where eagles soar?"

The first French translation was made by Marguerite Yourcenar, who was short of money and agreed to translate the book for the Paris publisher Stock. The work took her ten months. On 23 February 1937 she met Virginia Woolf in London and spent two hours with her, and wrote her preface after the visit. Les Vagues came out in Paris in September 1937, under the imprint Delamain et Boutelleau, in 269 pages. Yourcenar was sailing for the United States as it appeared.

In her preface Yourcenar called it a book with six characters, or rather six instruments, and compared the way the monologues cross to Johann Sebastian Bach's Art of Fugue. In 1989 the preface, with a second piece on Woolf, was collected in Yourcenar's book En pèlerin et en étranger under the title "Une femme étincelante et timide," a sparkling and shy woman. Her translation was reissued many times: by Plon in 1957 and 1969, by Stock in 1974, and by the Livre de Poche in 1986.

A second French translation, by Cécile Wajsbrot, came out from Calmann-Lévy in Paris in 1993, and the Paris press argued over the two. In Le Monde on 23 April 1993, Viviane Forrester accused Wajsbrot of cutting Woolf's repetitions and making her hard for French readers to follow. The translator Gérard de Cortanze took Wajsbrot's side in the Magazine littéraire. He said Yourcenar had turned Woolf's English park into a formal French garden.

In 2011 the director Marie-Christine Soma brought Les Vagues to the stage at La Colline, the national theatre on the rue Malte-Brun in the 20th arrondissement. She used Yourcenar's translation, with twelve actors, in the Petit Théâtre from 14 September to 15 October 2011. The production had opened at the Studio-Théâtre de Vitry in October 2010.

Writing it, and fixing it in proof

Woolf began the novel around 1929, under the working title The Moths. She drafted it by hand in seven numbered notebooks, plus a notebook of notes. The notebooks are now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. J. W. Graham published a transcription of the two drafts in 1976.

On 17 July 1931 she wrote in her diary that she had finished, having copied out the opening sentences for the eighteenth time. Leonard Woolf read it first. He told her it was a masterpiece and the best of her books. He also warned her that the first hundred pages were extremely difficult, and wondered how far an ordinary reader would follow.

Woolf was still revising in proof in August 1931. She told the composer Ethel Smyth that she had to fix "one chapter gone wrong." In 2025 Edward Mendelson reported the fix. A set of proofs she corrected for the American edition had reached Columbia University's rare book library with the papers of the publisher Donald Brace. Among other changes, she had cut thirty-eight words from Bernard's memory of calling on Rhoda and Louis, in his last speech.

The two first editions do not have the same text. The American edition appeared two weeks after the British one, but it prints an earlier state of the book. Woolf had to post her American proofs to New York before she finished correcting the British ones. Mendelson argues that the Hogarth Press text is her final version.