This work deals on how the “essai de soi” as literary method creates in Virginia Woolf’s work in particular in The Waves, not only a new form of writing in the literary sense but also a new form of thinking. For being able to understand how the essay is such an important incidence in the cited work of Virginia Woolf, I looked into The Essays by Michel de Montaigne, not only to analyze him as a philosopher with a specific esthetics and ethics but furthermore, as a method, as exegium in its multiple connotations and as a procedure that allowed the essay to be born as a literary form. By using the “essai de soi” Montaigne and Woolf make their self-portraits in words. For the comprehension of the procedure I established an echo with contemporary philosophers and the specialist analysis of self portrait work. For a better comprehension of the “essai de soi” that allows a latter approach to Woolf´s work. I propose the definition of specific principles in Montaigne´s method. They will be developed in separate ways as axes of the “essai de soi” with the characteristic and parallel interactions in each moment of his writing. In a sort of “jeu d’abîmes” I gaze into a cross homage. That of Montaigne to Etienne de La Boétie and the literary relation that Woolf establishes with Montaigne. Both authors use their writing as a form of autobiography but go beyond that by registering the daily transformation of the present. In Woolf´s characters, she uses a multiplicity of biographies of the same person, seen by different people in which she finds a source to build the others in her own mirror. The Waves is a radiography of the human spirit used as a philosophical subject, her writing has what Montaigne describes as an elliptical form of creation. Both authors dwell on the human experience, that is common to us all, that which communicates and identifies itself in the other. By doing so Woolf allows herself to translate Montaigne’s philosophy in a narrative style.
