#101 in Classics
The Waves
- 256
- Pages
- about 4.5 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“The Waves” renders six lives through soliloquies alone, in prose with the density of poetry. Some readers find the opening hard to enter and say that around the midpoint the voices become easy to follow and to tell apart. Others relish exactly that challenge and praise how fully each character is drawn. A book for the thoughtful reader who comes to Woolf for language.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Waves is a 1931 novel by English novelist Virginia Woolf. It is critically regarded as the culmination of her experimental lyric technique, consisting of ambiguous and cryptic soliloquies spoken by six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. Percival, a seventh character, appears in the soliloquies, though readers never hear him speak in his own voice.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.2 across 134 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 48% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Classics average of 7.7. That is how 8.0 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.8 | 13 | 10% |
| Hardcover | 8.2 | 121 | 90% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Waves?
It has 256 pages — shorter than 52% of the ranked books in Classics.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Classics — and a score of 8.0, the closest to this book.
