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Created January 25, 1999
What were the circumstances of writing The Waves?
Woolf began thinking of her "play-poem," The Waves, and accumulating notes which she saw as "like a lunatics dream" at least three years before she began writing it (D3 275). On November 23, 1926, she wrote, "Yet I am now and then haunted by some semi-mystic very profound life of a woman, which shall all be told on one occasion; and time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom out of the past. One incident -- say the fall of a flower -- might contain it. My theory being that the actual event practically does not exist -- nor time either" (D3 189). This experimental novel may have evolved from a mystical experience of depression she encountered at Monk’s House in 1926 (Hussey 351). Much of the novel, as we learn from Woolf’s diary, was composed as the author listened to classical music, mostly Beethoven’s late sonatas. Woolf documented the evolution of this novel carefully in her diary, relaying her excitement over her new "mystical" work, but then later explaining her doubts and frustration along with an overwhelming sense of failure.