The ship is sailing from England to South America, and then sailing up the Amazon. On board, Rachel is befriended—“adopted” might be more accurate—by her aunt, Helen Ambrose, a forceful, unsentimental woman in her early forties who is at least as central to the novel as Rachel. They disembark at Santa Marina, a village on the South American coast, take up residence in a haphazard villa with a neglected garden, and become involved with the denizens of the village’s only hotel, among them two young men: St. John Hirst, who bears a strong resemblance to Lytton Strachey and who falls in love with Helen, and Terence Hewet, an aspiring novelist, who argues many of Woolf’s own positions about writing and who falls in love with Rachel.

Ultimately, certain members of the group undertake a second voyage, up a river and into the jungle, and that is what changes everything.

The Voyage Out tells the tale of its doomed lovers amid a chorus of other stories, other points of view. Rachel Vinrace and Terence Hewet are, variously, the central, galvanizing figures and peripheral characters who play, at best, a supporting role in the stories of Helen Ambrose, St. John Hirst, Susan Warrington, Miss Allan, and others. An essential element of Woolf’s genius, visible from the beginning of her career, is her insistence on a fictive world too large and complex to focus its exclusive attention on any individual life. Try to enter the consciousness of a person, any person, and you are led immediately to dozens of other people, each of whom is integral, each in a different way. Woolf understood that every character about whom she wrote, even the most marginal, was visiting her novel from a novel of his or her own, and that that other, unwritten novel had as its main concerns the passions and fate of this character—this dowager or child or septuagenarian, this young woman who appears in the novel at hand only long enough to walk through a park. Although The Voyage Out is more orderly than most of the books Woolf went on to write, it is nevertheless bent out of traditional shape by these other, phantom novels (the one about the Ambrose family, the ones about St. John Hirst and Mrs. Thornbury and Evelyn Murgatroyd, not to mention Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, who appear briefly in The Voyage Out and will, of course, figure later in a book very much their own). They intrude on the story of Rachel and Terence out of necessity, not only because they are part of it but because they and Rachel and Terence are all part of a much larger story, a story too vast to tell.

Although the facts of Woolf’s life and death have tended to overshadow the appreciation of her work—she is too often thought of as a personality first and a writer second—her work and her life do in fact converge, particularly in this, her first novel. She insisted on writing only about people and states of feeling she knew well. She despised the Victorian penchant for elaborate invention, and so based most of her characters and situations, at least to some extent, on the people she knew and the things that had happened to her.

She was born Virginia Stephen in 1882, the third of four children. Her older sister, Vanessa, a complex and formidable person, a gifted painter, was arguably one of the three or four great loves of Virginia’s life and was certainly one of the models for Helen Ambrose. Virginia would always be drawn to charming, capable women—she especially admired social ease, which she felt she lacked entirely—and Helen Ambrose is the first in a long line of Woolf women, including Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, Susan in The Waves, and Maggie Pargiter in The Years, whom she would base on various aspects of various living women. She would use Vanessa and their mother, Julia; she would draw on her friendships with London society women like Kitty Maxse and Violet Dickinson, and, later, on her more volatile relationships with Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth.

Like Helen Ambrose and Rachel Vinrace, like most of the characters Woolf would create throughout her career, the Stephen children grew up among the lower ranks of the upper classes. That meant, in late Victorian England, that the Stephens inhabited a large house, had servants, and took holidays, but kept a close eye on accounts. They sent their sons to college but not their daughters; and while college for women was unusual at the time, it was not unknown. The decision to send only the boys to college was, finally, an economic one, made in spite of the fact that of the Stephen children Virginia was clearly the most gifted and the most intellectually curious. By way of compensation Virginia’s father, Leslie, insisted that he could give her a perfectly adequate education at home.

Leslie Stephen was nothing so simple as a villain, but by all known accounts the word “difficult” would be a generous description of him as husband and father. A prominent historian and biographer (he would probably be both proud and horrified to learn that, almost a century after his death, he is primarily known as Virginia’s father), he believed himself to be a genius, worried that he was not a genius, and laid claim to all the privileges to which genius at its most romantic may consider itself entitled. He suffered noisy, melodramatic agonies (over his work, over household finances); he threw tantrums; he required extravagant amounts of attention, sympathy, and reassurance and, receiving them, often demanded more. His determination not to suffer fools gladly, or at all, could terminate a dinner party; and his idea of an ideal evening’s entertainment often involved all present sitting silent as he read aloud.

At the same time he did in fact attend carefully to young Virginia’s education, gave her excellent books to read, took genuine pleasure in her precocity. She recognized his failings but loved him, and she and Vanessa argued the subject of his selfishness versus his goodness all their lives.

He was first married to one of Thackeray’s daughters, with whom he had a “backward” (possibly autistic) daughter named Laura, and after his first wife died he married Julia Duckworth, a widow with three children of her own, one of them a son named Gerald, who would sexually molest Virginia when she was six and would, over two decades later, publish The Voyage Out under the imprimatur of his publishing company, Duckworth & Co.

Julia, Virginia’s mother, was a woman of great beauty and magnetism, the willing handmaiden to Leslie’s tyrannical fragility, and while Julia and Leslie Stephen are most directly portrayed as Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, traces of one or both of them appear throughout Woolf’s fiction.