Woolf, however, takes it considerably further:

So she might have walked until she had lost all knowledge of her way, had it not been for the interruption of a tree, which, although it did not grow across her path, stopped her as effectively as if the branches had struck her in the face. It was an ordinary tree, but to her it appeared so strange that it might have been the only tree in the world. Dark was the trunk in the middle, and the branches sprang here and there, leaving jagged intervals of light between them as distinctly as if it had but that second risen from the ground. Having seen a sight that would last her for a lifetime, and for a lifetime would preserve that second, the tree once more sank into the ordinary ranks of trees, and she was able to seat herself in its shade and to pick the red flowers with the thin green leaves which were growing beneath it.

Parties pale—love itself pales—beside a glimpse of the ineffable, what Flannery O’Connor would call “the very heart of mystery,”10 and which O’Connor found, variously, in grandmothers, murderers, a stain on a ceiling, and a sty full of pigs.

If O’Connor was a Catholic visionary, Woolf was a secular one. She searched for the quintessential; she strove to know (or invent) the world’s secret names for itself. And so Rachel, her first heroine, is not so much a woman of actions or qualities as she is an engine of perception. At a picnic, early in the book, when Terence asks Rachel what she is looking at so intently, she answers, “Human beings.” She is simple enough, strange enough, to say something like that; something so direct and wise yet so insufficient. It is part of the novel’s business to keep showing her these human beings, and these singular and eternal trees, until she begins not only to see them but to take them in. The effort will ultimately kill her.

As Rachel moves through the book she has Helen as confidante and counterpoint: Helen who is worldly where Rachel is ignorant, weary where Rachel is untried. It could be argued that they are the truly central couple in the book. Helen is, to me, the book’s most interesting character by far, and is one of the strongest women Woolf ever created. If, during the course of the narrative, Rachel progresses from innocence to the beginnings of experience, Helen progresses from the comic to the tragic. She enters as a clown, and exists a deity.

The book opens with her, making her way with her husband to the dock where the ship is waiting. When we are introduced to her she could easily be one of the silly, colorful minor figures out of Fielding, Austen, or Dickens:

As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers’ clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady typists will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand.

The captivating, rather dreadful Clarissa Dalloway, who with her husband, Richard, boards late in the voyage and disembarks early, and who could not more clearly embody the life-quenching, anti-intellectual propriety of Victorian England, says of Helen and her husband:

“It’s what I’ve always said about literary people—they’re far the hardest of any to get on with.… These people … might have been, one feels, just like everybody else, if they hadn’t got swallowed up by Oxford or Cambridge or some such place, and been made cranks of. The man’s really delightful (if he’d cut his nails), and the woman has quite a fine face, only she dresses, of course, in a potato sack, and wears her hair like a Liberty shopgirl’s. They talk about art, and think us such poops for dressing in the evening. However, I can’t help that; I’d rather die than come in to dinner without changing—wouldn’t you? It matters ever so much more than the soup.”

As the book goes on Helen moves steadily toward its center of gravity, just as the book moves deeper and deeper into a realm of women and young, womanly men. The husbands and fathers—the forces of putative authority—are discarded, one by one. First Richard Dalloway gathers up his wife and leaves the ship when it reaches the coast of North Africa, then Helen and Ridley take Rachel with them while Rachel’s father continues up the Amazon, and finally Ridley disappears into his bottomless, vaguely delineated work. They are replaced by a cadre of women, some of whom are at least as forceful as the men. Among them are Miss Allan, who is about to complete a Primer of English Literature, from Beowulf to Swinburne; the beautiful Evelyn Murgatroyd, a malcontent and thwarted revolutionary; and Mrs. Flushing, vital and vulgar, a voracious art collector who proclaims loudly, “Nothin’ that’s more than twenty years old interests me.”

They are replaced, also, by two men of a sort very different from the Ridleys and Richards: the fey and brittle St. John Hirst, and the fey and almost painfully sincere Terence Hewet.

In Santa Marina Helen becomes Rachel’s mentor and she also becomes, by degrees, the book’s moral core, a voice of straightforward, profound unknowing on the subjects of love, art, vision, and how life might be most fully lived—all subjects the vanished men have, at one time or another, picked up from some dusty corner, looked at idly, and pronounced too trivial to contemplate. She becomes the advocate for and protector of life; she comes to resemble, in spirit at least, the nurse Woolf would invent some ten years later, knitting on a bench in Regent’s Park beside the sleeping Peter Walsh in Mrs. Dalloway:

In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveller, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of great hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.11

Woolf wrote, to some extent, about life in a parallel dimension, one ruled by female spirits. Things were not necessarily better there—she was nothing so simple as a Utopian—but it held in highest esteem virtues very different from those embraced by the world in which masculine gods ruled.

Helen’s acme, her great scene, takes place late in the book, in the jungle, where Terence and Rachel finally declare their love for each other. When the party arrives in the rain forest Helen seats herself on a fallen tree, opens her parasol, and looks out over the river.