WOOLF, Virginia (1882-1941). The Waves.

WOOLF, Virginia (1882-1941). The Waves. London: Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press, 1931. 8vo (185 x 125mm). Half title (sporadic very light mainly marginal spotting). Original mauve cloth, spine lettered in gilt (narrow strips faded at head and foot of spine, very faint and localised adhesive deposits to covers), dust-jacket designed by Vanessa Bell (piece torn away from head of backstrip with loss of part of 2 letters, some light spotting). Provenance: From the Library of the late Sir George Engle. FIRST EDITION of the author's celebrated modernist work in which "... each character speaks in soliloquy against the background of the sea. Several lives thus appear as in a pageant detached from the framework of daily life, but they change and grow old as time goes on. In the end one of the characters sums up the effect of their lives as a whole" (from the front turn-in). “Her most experimental novel in which a group of ‘early Bloomsburies’ with qualities amalgamated from Keynes, Strachey, Vanessa Bell and Desmond McCarthy, etc., are halted in a series of close-ups at various stages of their lives while their thought-trains are recorded, till they end in a crescendo of highly artificial writing that surprisingly comes off … [Her] most ambitious novel” (Connolly). Connolly The Modern Movement 70; Kirkpatrick A16a; Woolmer 279.