Rooms in The Waves
Final lecture in our Season on Virginia Woolf’s Rooms
Rooms in The Waves (1931) with Ellie Mitchell
‘But stories that follow people into their private rooms are difficult.’
Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves is one such difficult story. Or rather, it is a novel which tells several difficult stories. This lecture will explore the rooms into which the novel follows its characters, and will examine the ways in which Woolf uses those rooms to shape, contain, and organise the novel’s flowing narrative.
Like literary surveyors, we will tour the schoolroom, Bernard’s college rooms, the dining room, Louis’s attic room, the party room, Susan’s country rooms, the mysterious bedroom of the interludes, and more. What do these rooms have to tell us about the people who live in them, or visit them, or move through them? What does Bernard mean when he reflects in the novel’s final episode that ‘There are many rooms’, and thus ‘many Bernards’?
Saturday 13 June 2026. Live online.
18.00-20.00 British Summer Time
19.00-21.00 Central European Summer Time
Morning or lunchtime in the Americas
Further information and booking page on our website.
This is the final lecture and seminar in our current Virginia Woolf Season on Woolf’s Rooms. The new season, on Woolf and History, starts in September.
Dr Ellie Mitchell teaches at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.
