Brian Dillon on What Virginia Woolf’s The Waves Means to Him

Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, published in 1931, is described as one of the most abstract and poetic works in her literary career.

The novel’s origins trace back to Woolf’s reflections in her diary on November 28, 1928, where she mentioned the image of “a fin in a waste of water” while finishing To the Lighthouse.

Woolf also explored ideas about time and memory in earlier works like The Voyage Out, where a character expresses the desire to write a novel about silence—the unspoken aspects of life.

The novel’s structure is unconventional, blending poetic language with abstract imagery and minimal presence of traditional plot or parental figures.

Woolf’s drafts, initially titled The Moths, show her experimenting with giving the narrative voice to her characters, who are barely distinguishable from one another, and to an impersonal narrator that describes scenes without direct commentary.