Books: G. B. S. & E. T.

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Six children, three boys and three girls, apparently not related (Authoress Woolf never makes this clear), live in a house on the coast. They are all about the same age, all do the same lessons together under the severe eye of the governess. They go away to school, for the first time the boys & girls separate. But now you begin to recognize them as individuals. Bernard is happy-go-lucky, lovable; Louis is cold, snobbish, ashamed of his Australian accent; Neville is shyly passionate. Jinny is an attractive little animal; Susan fierce, proud; Rhoda is ungainly, helpless, doomed to hopelessness. After school Bernard and Neville go to the University; Louis's fortunes need him in business. Jinny takes to London society like a duck to water; Rhoda hates it; Susan goes home to be a country girl. As the sun climbs through the heavens they all get older, see each other on rarer and rarer occasions. Susan marries, so does Bernard; Jinny is having too good a time, Neville is too homosexual; Louis and Rhoda are lovers for a while. When you hear Bernard's final speech they are all well along in middle-age; Rhoda has killed herself; the sun has set. The effect of The Waves is less like that of a novel than of an epic; the plane in which the whole narration moves is more like poetry than prose. To this effect the artificial method of the story, in which the characters are like heralds speaking, contributes perhaps as much as the cunningly-contrived sentences. Authoress Woolf does not write the kind of phrases that can be skipped: in The Waves hides many a half-submerged treasure which a skimming reader might miss. Now & then you strike pure poetry: ". . . like one of those lamps that turn on slabs of racing water at midnight in the Atlantic, when perhaps only a spray of seaweed pricks the surface, or suddenly the waves gape and up shoulders a monster."

The Author— When Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London in 1882, daughter to once-famed Sir Leslie Stephen, literary critic and freethinker, she was related to half the most scholarly families in England (some of them: Darwins, Symondses, Stracheys). When she grew up to be a tall, pale, Burne-Jonesy young lady, she and her sister Vanessa lived together in Bloomsbury. Around them soon collected the nucleus of the "Bloomsbury Group" of writers (Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey). In 1912 Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf; together they founded the Hogarth Press. Critics soon became respectfully aware of Virginia Woolf. Said they: ". . . Liveliest imagination and most delicate style of her time. . . . Everything excites her, beggars and duchesses, snowflakes and dolphins. . . ." Passionately intelligent, with a long, drooping, intellectual face, large, heavy-lidded, straining eyes, Virginia Woolf looks as if she were peering out from a borderland where great wits remember their kinship to madness. Other books: The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Monday or Tuesday, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Common Reader, A Room of One's Own.

Short Faulkners