The Waves
内容简介
The Waves, more than any of Virginia Woolf's novels, conveys the complexities of human experience. Tracing the lives of a group of friends, The Waves follows their development from childhood to youth and middle age.
While social events, individual achievements and disappointments form its narrative, the novel is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that conveys the inner life of its characters: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation. Separately and together, they query the relationship of past to present, and the meaning of life itself.
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作者简介
Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid.
With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.
Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob’s Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women’s experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).
Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, and selections from her essays and short stories.
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目录
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读书文摘
生活并不是一幅幅匀称地装配好的眼镜；生活是一圈明亮的光环，生活是与我们的意识相始终的。包围着我们的一个半透明的封套。把这种变化多端、不可名状、难以界说的内在精神——不论它可能显得多么反常和复杂——用文字表达出来，并且尽可能少羼入一些外部杂质，这难道不是小说家的任务吗？
我们这些朋友——多么疏远，多么缄默，多么难得相互来往，缺乏了解啊。而我，对我的朋友们来说，也同样是朦胧模糊，一无所知的；就像一个影子，偶尔可以看见一眼，但更多的时候是见不到的。人生确实只是一场梦。我们的激情，那只是在寥寥几个人的眼里闪烁过的捉摸不定的幻想，很快就会熄灭。而且全都将消失不见。
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