The Waves
Price: $1,250.00
Hard Cover. Published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press, 1931. First Edition. Fair.
First edition, first printing. Publisher’s purple cloth, with spine lettered in gilt; lacking the scarce original dust jacket. With an ink presentation inscription on the front free endpaper from Bloomsbury Group member Saxon Sydney-Turner: "Barbara Bagenal / October 1931.", and with "from S. S-T." penciled in Bagenal’s hand below. With Gerald Bullett’s contemporary review from The New Statesman and Nation laid in. Fair, with toning and vertical crease to spine, stain to foot of spine, 1" split to cloth along rear spine joint, wear to spine ends and corners, and with marginal marks in pencil to a few pages. Overall, an excellent Bloomsbury association. Kirkpatrick A16a. Woolmer 279. The Waves is Virginia Woolf’s most experimental text, which pushes the boundaries of the novel both thematically and structurally. The plot focuses on the lives of six main characters, spanning from childhood to adulthood, and the text is composed of the characters’ spoken soliloquies. Like much of Woolf’s writing, The Waves is less plot-driven and more of a collection of captured moments; the beauty of The Waves lies in the eloquent descriptions of what Louis Kronenberger described as "the poetic symbols of life" in his 1931 review for The New York Times: "the changing seasons, day and night, bread and wine, fire and cold, time and space, birth and death and change." The Waves is arguably more poetry than novel, as Woolf used a variety of literary and poetic devices to blur the line between the two genres. A Bloomsbury Group association copy, from the library of artist Barbara Hiles Bagenal (1891-1984). A longtime friend of Carrington from their days at the Slade School of Fine Art, Bagenal also served as the second assistant to Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their fledgling Hogarth Press. Notably, she and Virginia worked together to set the type for Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude, Hogarth’s second book. She once lived in a tent on the Bells’ Charleston property and was romantically linked with several members of the Bloomsbury Group, including John Maynard Keynes, Saxon Sydney-Turner, David Garnett, and Clive Bell. Saxon Sydney-Turner (1880-1962) was a founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, emerging from the Cambridge Apostles alongside Leonard Woolf (his roommate), Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell. He was a fiercely intellectual, yet quiet and enigmatic member of the Group. Saxon Sydney-Turner fell in love with Barbara Hiles, but she rejected his proposal in favor of that of horticulturalist Nick Bagenal, whom she married in 1918. Sydney-Turner, in turn, declined Barbara’s offer to keep him as a lover, but the two remained close friends until Sydney-Turner’s death in 1962. Item #VW168
