The place to begin analysis of The Waves is to examine the intentions which lay behind the work. Establishing what Virginia Woolf thought she was doing, what her aims and ambitions were (insofar as they are revealed to us), will take us some way toward explaining the peculiarities of the book's form and begin to unravel some of the knotty difficulties of its meaning. Fortunately, Woolf left behind a great repository of comment on her hopes and fears for art in her voluminous diary. Now published in its full form, this diary has become an invaluable resource for the student, and in its pages we can begin to establish the lines of thought which lay behind this strange work.

Continuity and interruption: Orlando

One of the first and in many ways most important things which the diary makes plain is that the inspiration which was eventually to develop into The Waves came to her in late 1926, when she was in the last stages of writing her fifth novel, To the Lighthouse. We will come to the precise nature of this inspiration presently, but first it is worth pausing on the mere fact of this coincidence. There are many structural and thematic links between the two works, so in one sense this juxtaposition is satisfying. But it is also problematic and puzzling; for the book which followed To the Lighthouse was not in fact The Waves, but Orlando, a work which is radically different from either – and indeed different from anything else Woolf ever wrote. Charting the development of The Waves therefore demands that we sort out the tangled relation to its two predecessors, and establish the genuine lines of continuity in its evolution.