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[[MS 2750/575/50]]

Revised draft by Mr. Woolf

Copy.

THE WAVES

The Waves is a novel about seven people, but, like all great novels, its subject is really life, love and death and the relation of different men and women to these realities and to one another. The reader at first may not find the book easy reading, because, like Tolstoy and Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf was passionately interested in the objective realities behind the superficial stream of ordinary life and our ordinary thoughts, and she attempts to penetrate to those realities in her novel. In this book, for instance, the seven characters are all intimate friends throughout their lives and part of the "meaning" of the novel consists in its revelation of how, though each is a separate person, their intimacy and affection and the interweaving of their lives and deaths make them, in a sense, one person. Another thing which may make the book rather difficult at first reading is that, although written in prose, it has many of the characteristics of a great poem.