The Waves: Original Classic 1931 Edition

First published in 1931, The Waves is the sixth and most experimental novel by the English author Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). A 2015 BBC poll voted it the sixteenth greatest English novel of all time. (Woolf’s novels Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse were second and third.)

The novel consists of the internal monologues of six characters—Bernard, Jinny, Neville, Susan, Rhoda, and Louis—as they move through their lives from childhood to old age in twentieth-century England. It is punctuated ...