Book Club meeting at Françoise’s house on 14th March 2019
to discuss The Waves by Virginia Woolf.
Françoise, Jane and Caroline were present. Michelle had sent us her comments.
Three out of the six have read the Waves and all three fully appreciated the beauty of the poetry-prose of this extraordinary book. Virginia Woolf called it a play-poem and not a novel. There is no story and the three girls and three boys were not meant to be totally separate characters. There is a feeling of melancholy and sadness building from the inside out. Virginia reveals through their thoughts and their meetings throughout their lives, the extraordinary in a group of disparate and ordinary people. Their fears, their loves, their hopes, their self-questioning and much more.
Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 and died in 1941. Her father was a notable intellectual and her sister Vanessa became a well regarded painter. Her husband Leonard Woolf was a publisher. Virginia became one of the leading figures in the Bloomsbury Group with other writers, artists and thinkers. “They were an informal collection of like- minded people and friends who turned their back on Victorian society and ideas and hoped to discover a new artistic method to match the twentieth century”.
Sadly Virginia Woolf suffered from mental illness all her life but her sensitiveness and depth of feeling and expression have left us with several wonderful books to read and re-read.
Jane listened to us talking about the book and felt inspired to read it. It is a book that one can have next to one’s bed and go back to from time to time. Poetry, and very captivating.
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