In addition she wrote two biographies: Flush (1933), a whimsical account of the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, and Roger Fry (1940), a tribute to the painter, art critic, and curator who became a kind of father figure to the Bloomsbury group. A Writer’s Diary, a volume culled by Leonard Woolf from his wife’s personal papers, was published posthumously in 1953. “I have never read any book that conveyed more truthfully what a writer’s life is like,” said W. H. Auden. The memoir Moments of Being (1976) contains her only autobiogaphical writing. Woolf’s voluminous correspondence was compiled in The Letters of Virginia Woolf (six volumes, 1975–1980), and her extensive journals were amassed in The Diary of Virginia Woolf (four volumes, 1977–1982).

“Virginia Woolf was a great artist, one of the glories of our time, and she never published a line that was not worth reading,” judged Katherine Anne Porter. “The least of her novels would have made the reputation of a lesser writer, the least of her critical writings compare more than favorably with the best criticism of the past half-century.… She lived in the naturalness of her vocation. The world of the arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly. She was at home in that place as much as anyone ever was.” Forster concurred: “Virginia Woolf got through an immense amount of work, she gave acute pleasure in new ways, and pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness.”

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

Dedication

THE VOYAGE OUT

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

NOTES

COMMENTARY

READING GROUP GUIDE

INTRODUCTION

Michael Cunningham

The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf’s first novel, is, like every novel, a chronicle of its author’s attempts to learn how to write a novel. That may be more apparent in a first novel than it is in a fifth; but all novels, if they’re good, are by definition experiments, even if their structures and themes are traditional, just as novelists, if they’re good, spend their lives learning how to write novels, and die still trying.

Woolf spent nine years writing The Voyage Out, beginning when she was twenty-four years old. No subsequent book would take her half as long or go through so many drafts. After The Voyage Out she produced the more conventional Night and Day, which she wrote, in part, to demonstrate to herself and others that she could in fact write a conventional novel. Then she embarked upon a twenty-five-year roil of troubled fertility during which she produced Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, and Between the Acts, among other books. To a greater extent than any novelist except Joyce, she invented the Modernist novel, a drastic departure from the traditional form, with its heroics and high emotions; its morality; its unwavering point of view; and its unambiguous beginning, middle, and end. The novel, in Woolf’s hands, became prismatic, ambiguous, at least slightly chaotic, amoral, poetic, and concerned itself primarily with outwardly unremarkable people. It strove less to tell an uplifting tale and more to render life as lived, in its endless overlaps of the quotidian and the profound. Since Woolf’s time, novels in the traditional mode have continued to be written by the boxcar load, but the novel as an art form has never been the same.

Published in 1915, when Woolf had just turned thirty-three, The Voyage Out contains most of the elements of conventional narrative. It involves a love affair, an engagement, and a death; and it progresses, in orderly fashion, from its beginning through its middle to its end. But because it is a relatively familiar romance written by a great writer it defies convention to at least the same degree that it honors convention. Woolf believed (these are my words, not hers) that the meticulously structured, often inspirational novels of her time had about as much to do with the world and those who live in it as did a boat full of colonials and missionaries venturing into a jungle determined to subdue it. It was one of Woolf’s contributions to insist, in her fiction, that the world is too huge and mysterious, too impenetrably itself, for fiction as fiction is so often written; that any writer’s attempt to clear the field of its vines and creepers, to frighten off the hostile animals so as to set up a table for tea and begin to demonstrate a proper sense of right and wrong, is unlikely to come to a good or useful end. In her fiction Woolf bore witness to the world, saw and recorded some of its patterns, but did not attempt to enforce upon it any particular order or demand that it produce an order of its own. For this innovation she has often been accused of writing about nothing at all.

The Voyage Out employs the oldest and most venerable of narrative devices, the journey. It specifically concerns the fate of Rachel Vinrace, whose vivacious and compelling mother died when she was eleven, leaving her to be raised by her chilly father and two spinster aunts. Rachel is, at twenty-four, almost pathologically unformed. She knows nothing whatever about sex, has had only a smattering of education, and is hard put to hold up her end in an ordinary conversation. She is, however, a relatively accomplished pianist, and playing the piano is her one true passion. In her way she is the idealized Artist with a capital A—incompetent at and largely indifferent to everything except her art.

The novel begins with an ocean voyage on board a modest passenger steamer, the Euphrosyne (so named by Woolf as a private joke—it was the title of a collection of solemn poetry she considered ridiculous, published by her husband and some of her friends).