The Waves

The Waves is a novel by the English writer Virginia Woolf, published in 1931 and written as a series of soliloquies.

Six characters speak the novel in turn: Bernard, always looking for the phrase that will hold a moment; Susan, who wants a house and children; Rhoda, who cannot find a face to put on in front of other people; Neville, who loves one man and is otherwise uninterested in the world; Jinny, who thinks with her body; and Louis, who is ashamed of being an outsider and determined to succeed. A seventh figure, Percival, appears in everything they say and never speaks for himself. Between the soliloquies are short passages describing a coast from sunrise to sunset, which run alongside the lives the six of them describe. Woolf uses the form to write about identity as something made between people rather than held inside one of them.

It is the most experimental of her novels, and it followed A Room of One's Own and came before The Years, which was to be a more conventional book.