The experience of reading The Waves resembles listening more than reading; something sustained, almost musical. I read in short bursts, twenty pages at most. I needed to pause, to absorb. With Bernard’s final soliloquy, something shifted. The last fifty pages demanded a single sitting, barely breathing.

An introduction I read only afterwards offered this: “The reader of The Waves needs to swim, to trust to the buoyancy of the eye and the suppleness of the understanding. The events are there, sure enough, but they are not sundered from the flow.” This would have eased moments of uncertainty, but perhaps the uncertainty was part of the point.

Reading The Waves after Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse reveals a progression. Woolf circles something about self, voice, interiority; here it breaks through entirely. The knowledge that she saw the six characters as facets of herself sharpens the intimacy. Yet the intimacy remains formal, shaped by a mind on the edge of something vast. She wrote: “Here in the few minutes that remain, I must record, heaven be praised, the end of The Waves. I write the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice.”

To stumble after one’s own voice: that is the experience of reading this novel, too.