The Waves

THE WAVES

Virginia Woolf

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2022

Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Fran Fabriczki asserts her moral right as the author of the Life & Times section Classic Literature:

Words and Phrases adapted from Collins English Dictionary

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Source ISBN: 9780008527891

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CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

History of William Collins

Life and Times

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases

About the Publisher

History of William Collins

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William co-published in 1825, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time.

A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed, although the phrase wasn’t coined until 1907. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure books. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Life and Times

In an early critical essay, Virginia Woolf muses on the possibility of finding future classics among her contemporaries: ‘Here, if we could recognize it, lies some poem, or novel, or history which will stand up and speak with other ages about our age.’ The modern reader can’t help but smile at the dramatic irony, for it would be Woolf herself, decades on, who would become embedded in the canon of English literature, giving testament to her times. Woolf was born at the precipice of a tumultuous age: her life would come to encompass the end of the Victorian era, the suffragette movement and two world wars. Her writing traces the arc of these seismic changes, ranging from early realist novels that tied her to her literary predecessors, to polemical works on the rights of women and war, to the increasing unconventionality of her later works.

Early years

Her eventual ascent to literary fame is perhaps less surprising when taken in the context of her upbringing. Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent Victorian biographer, whose literary connections included icons such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry James and Thomas Hardy. Her mother, Julia Princep, was a renowned beauty who was photographed and painted by important contemporary artists. Stephen and Princep married in 1887, both bringing children from earlier marriages, one and three respectively, and eventually having four more children together. Their family home in Hyde Park bustled with activity, as did their house in Cornwall, which would later become the inspiration for the setting of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. While Woolf’s brothers went to school, she and her sister Vanessa were mostly educated at home (although Woolf later attended classes at King’s College, London), where their father’s tastes had a significant influence on their learning. The Stephen children were a precocious bunch with a variety of intellectual and artistic interests. Notably, Vanessa would become a famous artist in her own right, and their younger brother, Adrian, a psychoanalyst. As children they produced a weekly newspaper together for their parents, and no doubt imbibed much of the intellectual milieu they grew up in. However, Woolf’s happy childhood was marred by the abuse of her elder half-siblings, of which she writes in her later autobiographical works. Woolf suffered further mental strain when her mother, by her accounts the epicentre of their family life, passed away in 1895 when Virginia was only thirteen. After their mother’s death, their father became a tyrannical figure in the life of the family.

New beginnings in Bloomsbury

Nonetheless, the death of her father in 1904 deeply affected Woolf, but it was also the last tether tying her to her childhood, and the family’s move to a new home in Bloomsbury brought with it a sense of liberation in many ways. In their new home the family were no longer burdened by the social coda of the previous generation and entertained a wide variety of guests in a casual manner. Woolf’s brother Thoby had gone to Cambridge, where he met the likes of Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes and Leonard Woolf (Virginia’s future husband), who became good friends of the siblings. At their new home Thoby hosted ‘Thursday Evenings’, a series of informal get-togethers where the attendees discussed the intellectual interests of the day. The group that formed in the rooms of 46 Gordon Square would become the stuff of literary legend, with many of them going on to achieve great acclaim in their respective fields, and their ever-entangled personal lives continuing to provide fodder for gossip. Although in many ways this was a joyously liberating time for Woolf, it was not without its difficulties. Woolf’s brother Thoby died of typhoid in 1906, and her sister Vanessa married Clive Bell the year after – thus the Stephens siblings’ close life together came to an end.

The following years were intellectually formative – Woolf took part in the suffragist movement, had close ties to the Post-Impressionist exhibition that shocked London society, wrote reviews for the TLS and began to write what would later become The Voyage Out (1915). She continued to suffer from poor mental health, undergoing several weeks of ‘rest cure’ in the countryside.

Hogarth Press and partnership with Leonard Woolf

In 1911, Leonard Woolf returned from Ceylon where he was in the Civil Service and renewed his friendship with Virginia’s circle. In 1912, Virginia and Leonard married, beginning a lifelong partnership that was as much intellectual as romantic. The couple moved to Richmond in 1915 and together founded the Hogarth Press. The small publishing house was not only a means of publishing their own work, but an introduction to many formative literary and intellectual figures, such as Katherine Mansfield, whose Prelude was published by Hogarth Press, as well as Sigmund Freud, whose works they were the first to publish in English, and who had a great influence on the thinking of many in the Bloomsbury Group. Woolf herself, after having her first two novels published elsewhere, published all subsequent works through Hogarth Press, thus retaining greater creative control over her work.

Artistic maturity and The Waves

The 1920s were an incredibly productive decade for Woolf, during which she published four of her major novels, including Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and a short story collection called Monday or Tuesday. Her novels began to shift away from traditional narrative forms, delving into the characters’ psyches with the use of free indirect discourse and later on, stream of consciousness.

These prolific years partly overlapped with her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, an aristocratic writer whom she met through the Bloomsbury Group. Not only was it an important romantic relationship in Woolf’s life, but it was a mutually beneficial friendship, contributing to the fruitful writing careers of both women. Sackville-West published commercially successful novels such as The Edwardians with the Hogarth Press, while Woolf wrote Orlando (1928), which was partly inspired by their relationship.

In 1931, Woolf published The Waves, now considered to be one of her most experimental works. Following the lives of six characters speaking soliloquies directly to the reader, it blurs the line between prose and poetry to create its own form. Woolf herself called it a ‘play-poem’. In The Waves, the six narrators share a history and a childhood. It is this shared identity that is challenged throughout the work, and Woolf examines both the instability and constancy of the self and of friendship through lyrical metaphors of the ocean. The Waves is now seen as Woolf’s reflection on the changes she experienced in 1906 – most notably the loss of her brother, Thoby.

Turbulent times

After several years of prolific literary output, in the turbulent decade leading up to the Second World War, Woolf became increasingly politically involved, taking part in several antifascist committees, and supporting her husband’s work with the Labour Party. It was during this time that she wrote her polemical work Three Guineas (1937). In a way her writing returned to the roots of her paternal education, as she began to write works of biography, such as Flush (1933) and Roger Fry (1940).

As the Second World War began, the Woolfs were living in Holborn, where Woolf was working on her memoirs, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, and her final novel Between the Acts. On 28 March 1941, after decades of struggle with her mental health, Woolf committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse.

Although in popular culture Woolf is often remembered for the tragic end to her life, as well as the entangled love lives of the Bloomsbury Group, it is her sustained intellectual engagement with the movements of her time and her contributions to the canon of feminist writing that continues to engage her readers, cementing her place among the greats of English literature.

THE WAVES

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.

‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’

‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, ‘spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’

‘I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and down.’

‘I see a globe,’ said Neville, ‘hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.’

‘I see a crimson tassel,’ said Jinny, ‘twisted with gold threads.’

‘I hear something stamping,’ said Louis. ‘A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.’

‘Look at the spider’s web on the corner of the balcony,’ said Bernard. ‘It has beads of water on it, drops of white light.’

‘The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears,’ said Susan.

‘A shadow falls on the path,’ said Louis, ‘like an elbow bent.’

‘Islands of light are swimming on the grass,’ said Rhoda. ‘They have fallen through the trees.’

‘The birds’ eyes are bright in the tunnels between the leaves,’ said Neville.

‘The stalks are covered with harsh, short hairs,’ said Jinny, ‘and drops of water have stuck to them.’

‘A caterpillar is curled in a green ring,’ said Susan, ‘notched with blunt feet.’

‘The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the blades behind him,’ said Rhoda.

‘And burning lights from the window-panes flash in and out on the grasses,’ said Louis.

‘Stones are cold to my feet,’ said Neville. ‘I feel each one, round or pointed, separately.’

‘The back of my hand burns,’ said Jinny, ‘but the palm is clammy and damp with dew.’

‘Now the cock crows like a spurt of hard, red water in the white tide,’ said Bernard.

‘Birds are singing up and down and in and out all round us,’ said Susan.

‘The beast stamps; the elephant with its foot chained; the great brute on the beach stamps,’ said Louis.

‘Look at the house,’ said Jinny, ‘with all its windows white with blinds.’

‘Cold water begins to run from the scullery tap,’ said Rhoda, ‘over the mackerel in the bowl.’

‘The walls are cracked with gold cracks,’ said Bernard, ‘and there are blue, finger-shaped shadows of leaves beneath the windows.’

‘Now Mrs Constable pulls up her thick black stockings,’ said Susan.

‘When the smoke rises, sleep curls off the roof like a mist,’ said Louis.

‘The birds sang in chorus first,’ said Rhoda. ‘Now the scullery door is unbarred. Off they fly. Off they fly like a fling of seed. But one sings by the bedroom window alone.’

‘Bubbles form on the floor of the saucepan,’ said Jinny. ‘Then they rise, quicker and quicker, in a silver chain to the top.’

‘Now Billy scrapes the fish-scales with a jagged knife on to a wooden board,’ said Neville.

‘The dining-room window is dark blue now,’ said Bernard, ‘and the air ripples above the chimneys.’

‘A swallow is perched on the lightning-conductor,’ said Susan. ‘And Biddy has smacked down the bucket on the kitchen flags.’

‘That is the first stroke of the church bell,’ said Louis. ‘Then the others follow; one, two; one, two; one, two.’

‘Look at the table-cloth, flying white along the table,’ said Rhoda. ‘Now there are rounds of white china, and silver streaks beside each plate.’

‘Suddenly a bee booms in my ear,’ said Neville. ‘It is here; it is past.’

‘I burn, I shiver,’ said Jinny, ‘out of this sun, into this shadow.’

‘Now they have all gone,’ said Louis. ‘I am alone. They have gone into the house for breakfast, and I am left standing by the wall among the flowers. It is very early, before lessons. Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. Stalks rise from the black hollows beneath. The flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs. Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing. I am a boy in grey flannels with a belt fastened by a brass snake up here. Down there my eyes are the lidless eyes of a stone figure in a desert by the Nile. I see women passing with red pitchers to the river; I see camels swaying and men in turbans. I hear tramplings, tremblings, stirrings round me.

‘Up here Bernard, Neville, Jinny and Susan (but not Rhoda) skim the flower-beds with their nets. They skim the butterflies from the nodding tops of the flowers. They brush the surface of the world. Their nets are full of fluttering wings. Louis! Louis! Louis! they shout. But they cannot see me. I am on the other side of the hedge. There are only little eye-holes among the leaves. Oh Lord, let them pass. Lord, let them lay their butterflies on a pocket-handkerchief on the gravel. Let them count out their tortoise-shells, their red admirals and cabbage whites. But let me be unseen. I am green as a yew tree in the shade of the hedge. My hair is made of leaves. I am rooted to the middle of the earth. My body is a stalk. I press the stalk. A drop oozes from the hole at the mouth and slowly, thickly, grows larger and larger. Now something pink passes the eyehole. Now an eye-beam is slid through the chink. Its beam strikes me. I am a boy in a grey flannel suit. She has found me. I am struck on the nape of the neck. She has kissed me. All is shattered.’

‘I was running,’ said Jinny, ‘after breakfast. I saw leaves moving in a hole in the hedge. I thought That is a bird on its nest. I parted them and looked; but there was no bird on a nest. The leaves went on moving. I was frightened. I ran past Susan, past Rhoda, and Neville and Bernard in the tool-house talking. I cried as I ran, faster and faster. What moved the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs? And I dashed in here, seeing you green as a bush, like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed. Is he dead? I thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving, though there is nothing to move them. Now I smell geraniums; I smell earth mould. I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering flung over you.’

‘Through the chink in the hedge,’ said Susan, ‘I saw her kiss him. I raised my head from my flower-pot and looked through a chink in the hedge. I saw her kiss him. I saw them, Jinny and Louis, kissing. Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons. I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and die there.’

‘Susan has passed us,’ said Bernard. ‘She has passed the tool-house door with her handkerchief screwed into a ball. She was not crying, but her eyes, which are so beautiful, were narrow as cats’ eyes before they spring. I shall follow her, Neville. I shall go gently behind her, to be at hand, with my curiosity, to comfort her when she bursts out in a rage and thinks, I am alone.

‘Now she walks across the field with a swing, nonchalantly, to deceive us. Then she comes to the dip; she thinks she is unseen; she begins to run with her fists clenched in front of her. Her nails meet in the ball of her pocket-handkerchief. She is making for the beech woods out of the light. She spreads her arms as she comes to them and takes to the shade like a swimmer. But she is blind after the light and trips and flings herself down on the roots under the trees, where the light seems to pant in and out, in and out. The branches heave up and down. There is agitation and trouble here. There is gloom. The light is fitful. There is anguish here. The roots make a skeleton on the ground, with dead leaves heaped in the angles. Susan has spread her anguish out. Her pocket-handkerchief is laid on the roots of the beech trees and she sobs, sitting crumpled where she has fallen.’

‘I saw her kiss him,’ said Susan. ‘I looked between the leaves and saw her. She danced in flecked with diamonds light as dust. And I am squat, Bernard, I am short. I have eyes that look close to the ground and see insects in the grass. The yellow warmth in my side turned to stone when I saw Jinny kiss Louis. I shall eat grass and die in a ditch in the brown water where dead leaves have rotted.’

‘I saw you go,’ said Bernard. ‘As you passed the door of the tool-house I heard you cry I am unhappy. I put down my knife. I was making boats out of firewood with Neville. And my hair is untidy, because when Mrs Constable told me to brush it there was a fly in a web, and I asked, Shall I free the fly? Shall I let the fly be eaten? So I am late always. My hair is unbrushed and these chips of wood stick in it. When I heard you cry I followed you, and saw you put down your handkerchief, screwed up, with its rage, with its hate, knotted in it. But soon that will cease. Our bodies are close now. You hear me breathe. You see the beetle too carrying off a leaf on its back. It runs this way, then that way, so that even your desire while you watch the beetle, to possess one single thing (it is Louis now) must waver, like the light in and out of the beech leaves; and then words, moving darkly, in the depths of your mind will break up this knot of hardness, screwed in your pocket-handkerchief.’

‘I love,’ said Susan, ‘and I hate. I desire one thing only. My eyes are hard. Jinny’s eyes break into a thousand lights. Rhoda’s are like those pale flowers to which moths come in the evening. Yours grow full and brim and never break. But I am already set on my pursuit. I see insects in the grass. Though my mother still knits white socks for me and hems pinafores and I am a child, I love and I hate.’

‘But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.’

‘I see the beetle,’ said Susan. ‘It is black, I see; it is green, I see; I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.’

‘Now,’ said Bernard, ‘let us explore. There is the white house lying among the trees. It lies down there ever so far beneath us. We shall sink like swimmers just touching the ground with the tips of their toes. We shall sink through the green air of the leaves, Susan. We sink as we run. The waves close over us, the beech leaves meet above our heads. There is the stable clock with its gilt hands shining. Those are the flats and heights of the roofs of the great house. There is the stable-boy clattering in the yard in rubber boots. That is Elvedon.

‘Now we have fallen through the tree-tops to the earth. The air no longer rolls its long, unhappy, purple waves over us. We touch earth; we tread ground. That is the close-clipped hedge of the ladies’ garden. There they walk at noon, with scissors, clipping roses. Now we are in the ringed wood with the wall round it. This is Elvedon. I have seen signposts at the cross-roads with one arm pointing To Elvedon. No one has been there. The ferns smell very strong, and there are red funguses growing beneath them. Now we wake the sleeping daws who have never seen a human form; now we tread on rotten oak apples, red with age and slippery. There is a ring of wall round this wood; nobody comes here. Listen! That is the flop of a giant toad in the undergrowth; that is the patter of some primeval fir-cone falling to rot among the ferns.

‘Put your foot on this brick. Look over the wall. That is Elvedon. The lady sits between the two long windows, writing. The gardeners sweep the lawn with giant brooms. We are the first to come here. We are the discoverers of an unknown land. Do not stir; if the gardeners saw us they would shoot us. We should be nailed like stoats to the stable door. Look! Do not move. Grasp the ferns tight on the top of the wall.’

‘I see the lady writing. I see the gardeners sweeping,’ said Susan. ‘If we died here, nobody would bury us.’

‘Run!’ said Bernard. ‘Run! The gardener with the black beard has seen us! We shall be shot! We shall be shot like jays and pinned to the wall! We are in a hostile country. We must escape to the beech wood. We must hide under the trees. I turned a twig as we came. There is a secret path. Bend as low as you can. Follow without looking back. They will think we are foxes. Run!

‘Now we are safe. Now we can stand upright again. Now we can stretch our arms in this high canopy, in this vast wood. I hear nothing. That is only the murmur of the waves in the air. That is a wood-pigeon breaking cover