When Virginia Woolf published The Waves, she was forty-nine years old. Starting from this stage of maturity and experience, Virginia Woolf's prose uses interior monologue to immerse us in the lives of six characters, from childhood to old age. More than a novel, the reader faces a weave of forms, sensations, colors, and sounds that follow the rhythm and beat of the waves: always the same, always different, omnipresent. Woolf's text flows, like those waves, fleetingly, eternally, making this novel a key work for understanding 20th-century literature.
Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) was one of the central figures of 20th-century literary modernism. Daughter of the critic and historian Leslie Stephen, she grew up in a deeply intellectual environment that shaped her education from a very young age. She soon became one of the most influential voices of the so-called Bloomsbury Group, a decisive circle in British cultural renewal, where she developed her interest in feminism, aesthetic experimentation, and new ways of narrating inner experience.
During the 1920s, she founded the publishing house Hogarth Press together with Leonard Woolf, through which she promoted both her own work and that of key authors of her time. Novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse transformed contemporary narrative through their exploration of consciousness and subjective time. In 1941, after several depressive episodes worsened by the context of World War II in the United Kingdom, she took her own life. Her work remains an essential reference in modern literature.
