It is critically regarded as her most experimental work,[1] consisting of ambiguous and cryptic soliloquies spoken mainly by six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis.

The dialogues that span the characters' lives are broken up by nine brief third-person interludes detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day from sunrise to sunset.

Neville, who may be partly based on another of Woolf's friends, Lytton Strachey, seeks out a series of men, each of whom becomes the present object of his transcendent love.

The difficulty of assigning genre to this novel is complicated by the fact that The Waves blurs distinctions between prose and poetry, allowing the novel to flow between six interior monologues.

The book similarly breaks down boundaries between people, and Woolf herself wrote in her Diary that the six were not meant to be separate "characters" at all, but rather facets of consciousness illuminating a sense of continuity.

The book explores the role of the "ethos of male education" in shaping public life, and includes scenes of some of the characters experiencing bullying during their first days at school.

"[8] Theatre director Katie Mitchell, who adapted The Waves for the stage, called the work "entrancing […] Woolf's point is that the lasting and significant events in our lives are small and insignificant in the eyes of the outside world.