Books

First edition, first impression, of the author's most ambitious and experimental novel. This copy is one of the finest we have handled. Cyril Connolly hailed The Waves as Woolf's "masterpiece... It is one of the books which comes nearest to stating the mystery of life and so, in a sense, nearest to solving it" (Connolly, p. 49). The text is woven from the interior voices of its six protagonists, who were in part modelled on E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, Mary Hutchison, Vanessa Bell, and Woolf herself, revealing their respective loves and loneliness. Octavo. Original purple cloth, spine lettered in gilt. With dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell. Cloth vibrant, extremities a touch rubbed; unclipped jacket sharp, spine mildly toned, nicks to extremities: a fine copy in near-fine jacket. Kirkpatrick A16a; Woolmer 279. Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 2008.