The Waves (Vintage Classics)

Key Features

• The only edition of The Waves to use the original text first published by The HogarthPress
• 2012 sees the relaunch of Virginia Woolf in Vintage Classics with a strong,contemporary series style.
• Vintage Classics publish Woolf's Selected Diaries and Selected Letters as part of theVintage Woolf series and are the only publishers to have editions of these fascinatingwindows into the life of this much admired writer.

About the Book: The Waves

With introductions by Jeanette Winterson and Gillian Beer

The Waves is an astonishingly beautiful and poetic novel. It begins with six childrenplaying in a garden by the sea and follows their lives as they grow up and experiencefriendship, love and grief at the death of their beloved friend Percival. Regarded by manyas her greatest work, The Waves is also seen as Virginia Woolf's response to the loss ofher brother Thoby, who died when he was twenty-six.

The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson, andthe texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard andVirginia Woolf.

About the Author: Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editorof The Dictionary of National Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister,the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of 'TheBloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included LyttonStrachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century Britishculture.

In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later,her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) andJacob's Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf'sdistinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time that she and LeonardWoolf founded The Hogarth Press with the publication of the co-authored Two Stories in1917, hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey.

Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finestmasterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel TheWaves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, shortfiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and ARoom of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivitywas often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since hermother's death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of herfinal novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.

Reviews

Clear, bright, burnished, at once marvellously accurate and subtly connotative. Thepure, delicate sensibility found in this language and the moods that it expresses area true kind of poetry' - New York Times