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A character in The Waves

Rhoda

A fatherless girl who feels she has no face, dreads other people, and lives in daydreams of pools and marble pillars far away.

What they want

She wants to escape the pressure of other people and reach a world she calls immune from change.

The book

The WavesVirginia Woolf, 1931

Virginia Woolf's novel of six friends who speak in turn from childhood to old age, while the sun crosses one day over the sea.

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Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Rhoda is shy, frightened and full of private visions. She copies the other girls so that nobody notices her, and each opening door feels to her like a tiger leaping. Herbert Marder calls her the most inward of the six, a visionary appalled by society.

How Rhoda Is Portrayed

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • White petals in a basinOn pages 17 to 18 she floats white petals in a brown basin and calls them her fleet of ships. The others sink in the storm she makes. One ship sails on alone, and it is hers.
  • The sum she cannot doOn pages 20 to 21 the teacher writes figures on the blackboard. The others hand in their answers and leave. Rhoda cannot find hers, and is left alone with the ticking clock.
  • No faceOn pages 35 and 45 she says she has no face. She ducks behind Susan so that the looking-glass on the stairs will not show her.
  • Copying the othersOn pages 45 to 46 and 142 she admits she copies Susan and Jinny, down to the way they pull on their stockings. She does it so that she seems to have an end in view.
  • The Empress in the bathroomOn pages 59 to 61, washing her hands, she imagines herself a Russian Empress facing a hostile mob from a balcony. Then Miss Lambert walks past, and the dream falls down like a paper tree.
  • Terror at a partyOn pages 113 to 116 every opening door at a party is the tiger leaping. She escapes to the balcony and sees two faceless figures against the sky, a world immune from change.

Rhoda quotes

Lines spoken by or about Rhoda, each verified verbatim against the text and located in the book.

But here I am nobody. I have no face.
— Rhoda · Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931), second section
Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

After Percival's death Rhoda walks down Oxford Street in disgust, sits through a concert and throws violets into the water at Greenwich. She becomes Louis's lover, then leaves him because she fears embraces. On a hill in Spain she imagines lying on her deathbed and falling into the sea. In the last section Bernard mentions that she has killed herself.

If you like The Waves

Four books that share themes, tone, or setting with this one.

If you like Virginia Woolf

Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

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    The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.

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    French writer and philosopher whose novels, memoirs, and social analysis examined freedom, gender, responsibility, aging, and the material conditions that shape a life.

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    Henry Miller

    The Brooklyn dropout who arrived in Paris broke at thirty-eight and wrote the exuberant, banned books that ended American censorship.

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