Virginia Woolf marvelled at the beauty and fluidity of an ordinary day, describing the mind as receiving <blockquote>a myriad of impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.<sup>1</sup></blockquote> Similarly, she believed in the artistic freedom to base the literary novel on emotion over convention.<br> <br>In her essay <em>Modern Fiction</em> she deals with this contradiction, the problematic concept of the novel, proposing that the writer is constrained by a tyrant who enforces a plethora of rules. Woolf explains that this metaphorical tyrant requires plot, love interest, tragedy, comedy and unfaltering probability. “Is life like this?”<sup>2</sup> she ponders and then asks, “must novels be like this?”<sup>3</sup><br> <br>Woolf went on to breathe life into these theories when she wrote <em>The Waves</em> (1931). Of this work she famously told composer Ethel Smyth, “I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.”<sup>4</sup> Comparing its structure to a piece of music, she sought to reimagine the definition of the novel itself.<br> <br>Upon the original manuscript she scrawled notes to allude to this redefinition; claiming she would be glad if this piece was in fact not read as though it were a novel. Elsewhere, she rather charmingly pronounced it as a “playpoem”.<sup>5</sup><br> <br><em>The Waves</em> follows the lives of six characters from childhood to adult life in a series of what she terms as “dramatic soliloquies”.<sup>6</sup> Woolf speaks directly from inside each of the characters’ minds, narrating their thoughts and insights to the rhythm of the sea by which they live.<br>