The Voyage Out (Collins Classics)

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Rachel falls in love with a young Englishman, Terence, in Santa Marina. But tragically, she falls ill and dies. Yet, in the brief time that Helen and Terence have known her, her journey has also made them reflect about their own lives.

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers Virginia Woolf’s first foray into the novel The Voyage Out is announced as the author’s first novel. That fact is the most hopeful thing about it. With the cleverness shown here, crude as most of it is, there should be a possibility of something worth while from the same pen in the future.Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published.. A review of The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf, originally published in the New York Times, June 1920: This English novel, by an English writer, gives promise in its opening chapters of much entertainment. Later, the reader is disappointed. If this book were a painting instead of a novel, it would be focused entirely on Helen so intrinsic to everything is her role in Woolf’s composition. So the story maunders on, and the fact that it is crowded with incident, most of it futile, and that the clever talk by everyone continues in a confusing cataract in every chapter, does not save it from becoming extremely tedious. There are two known copies of the first edition that Woolf is known to have used to record her intended alterations ahead of the 1920 re-issue in the USA. The first is in a private collection in the USA.

The following version of the book was used to create this study guide: Woolf. Virginia. The Voyage Out. Modern Library, 2000. Virginia Woolf is rightly celebrated as one of the most talented innovators of the modernist period for the work she produced between Jacob’s Room in 1922 and The Waves in 1932. For that reason her earlier first novel The Voyage Out (1915) is often classified as ‘traditional’ or ‘conventional’. That is partly because its main subject is a young woman’s ‘coming of age’, partly because the narrative follows a linear chronology, and partly because the book contains a substantial proportion of well-observed middle-class social life which could have come from any number of nineteenth century novels – from Jane Austen to George Meredith. The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf’s first novel, published in 1915. It tells the story of Rachel Vinrace, a young woman who has previously led a sheltered life in the care of her aunts and knows very little about the world. This all changes on a trip to South America, when her other aunt, Helen, persuades her father to let her stay with her and her husband in Santa Marina. There, Rachel learns about the world and about herself, begins to assert her own identity and falls in love, before tragedy puts an abrupt end to her newfound happiness.If we look at her works, what we evidently notice is that the idea which most engages Virginia Woolf is that of life it

Some critics interpret Terence’s description of himself as a great lover as a pretence on his part. See, for example, Louise DeSalvo’s Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (London: Macmillan, 1980) p. 46, and Mitchell Leaska, The Novels of Virginia Woolf: From Beginning to End (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977) p. 22. Woolf’s criticism of a great many novelists — and particularly women — centres upon the fact that they use their writing as a vehicle for confessional autobiography. A writer is, perhaps, particularly likely to use the first novel to unburden personal obsessions and experiences. Given that this is the case, the ‘objective’ tone of Woolf’s own first novel is the more remarkable. In writing The Voyage Out Woolf did, of course, draw upon the details of her own life. One thinks, for example, of her mental instability, her sister Vanessa’s illness and brother Thoby’s death from typhoid, her voyage to Spain and Portugal with her younger brother Adrian in the spring of 1905, and, particularly, her interest in feminism. 1 In the novel, though, these personal experiences are transformed from autobiography into fiction. 2 The emphasis in The Voyage Out falls not upon Woolf the private individual, but upon her fictional characters. It is primarily the lives of these latter, rather than that of the author, which sustain our interest. 3 Keywords there was no subject in the world which she knew accurately. Her mind was in the state of an intelligent man’s in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; she would believe practically anything she was told. invent reasons for anything she said. The shape of the earth, the history of the world, how trains worked, or money was invested, what laws were in force, which people wanted what, and why they wanted it, the most elementary idea of a system in modern life—none of this had been imparted to her by any of her professors or mistresses A young woman learns about life, and love found and lost, in this thought-provoking debut novel by one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and prolific writers—with an introduction by Elisa Gabbert, author of The Unreality of Memory Compare Huxley’s comments on Burlap’s feelings for his dead wife in Point Counter Point: ‘These agonies which Burlap, by a process of intense concentration on the idea of his loss and grief, had succeeded in churning up within himself were in no way proportionate or even related to his feelings for the living Susan’ (Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928) p. 231).J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1869) p. 523; quoted in Millett’s Sexual Politics, p. 103. Chapter XXIII. Rachel is annoyed by people’s inquisitiveness now that she is engaged. A message from home brings news of the suicide of a housemaid. A ‘prostitute’ is expelled from the hotel. Hirst admits to himself that he is unhappy, but he brings himself to congratulate Hewet and Rachel. Chapter XXIV. Sitting in the hotel, Rachel comes to an appreciation of her independent identity, even though she is joining herself to Hewet for the rest of her life. Miss Allan finishes her book on the English poets. Evelyn envies Susan and Rachel for being engaged, but she herself dreams of becoming a revolutionary. Instead we are presented with what Rachel Vinrace calls for during the events of the novel –“Why don’t people write about the things they do feel?” . Despite all the symbolism of a first journey away from home, a first love affair, and the dawning of mature consciousness which Rachel experiences, the bulk of the novel is taken up with what people say and think about each other. This was a bold alternative to the plot-driven novels of the late Victorian era. This practical and insightful reading guide offers a complete summary and analysis of The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf. It provides a thorough exploration of the novel’s plot, characters and main themes, including women’s position in society and the limitations of words as a mode of expression. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time.