Virginia Woolf

2001 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Biographical note copyright © 2000 by Random House, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2000 by Michael Cunningham
Notes and Reading Group Guide copyright © 2001 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Harcourt, Inc. for permission to reprint excerpts from “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” from The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf. Copyright © 1950 and copyright renewed 1978 by Harcourt, Inc. Excerpts from “Am I a Snob?” from Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf. Copyright © 1976 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. Excerpts from “Modern Fiction” in The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf. Copyright © 1925 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1953 by Leonard Woolf. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941.
The voyage out/Virginia Woolf; introduction by Michael Cunningham; notes by Deborah Lutz.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76974-9
1. British—South America—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 3. Ocean travel—Fiction. 4. Young women—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6045.O72    V68    2001
823’.912—dc21         00-52724

Modern Library website address: www.BookishMall.com

v3.1

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Virginia Woolf (née Stephen)—the novelist, critic, and essayist whose feminist and modernist concerns changed the course of twentieth-century literature—was born in London on January 25, 1882. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was an eminent Victorian historian and biographer who oversaw his daughter’s education. “To read what one liked because one liked it, never to pretend to admire what one did not—that was his only lesson in the art of reading,” she recalled. “To write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one meant—that was his only lesson in the art of writing. All the rest must be learnt for oneself.” She experienced a traumatic adolescence following the deaths of her mother and stepsister, and suffered mental breakdowns the rest of her life. After Sir Leslie’s death in 1904 she settled in the Bloomsbury district of London with her siblings—Vanessa, Thoby, and Adrian—and soon became a central figure in the Bloomsbury group, an intellectual circle that included writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and John Maynard Keynes. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, another member of the group, and in 1917 the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which published the early works of Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Sigmund Freud.