Excerpts from The Waves, by Virginia Woolf

GILLIAN BEER, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy since 2001, is the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, Emerita, and past President of Clare Hall College, University of Cambridge. Her books include Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (3rd ed., 2009), Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground: Essays by Gillian Beer (1996), and Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996). She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1998.