Exhorted by the others to explore, she says, “Oh, no, one’s only got to use one’s eye. There’s everything here—everything. What will you gain by walking?” And so she sits, with St. John at her side (literally in her shade), as Rachel and Terence wander off together.

It is by way of Helen and the jungle that the book reaches its most strange and archetypal interlude, the moment that might be called its climax. Terence and Rachel are strolling in the long grass, talking about their love (their love is made up almost entirely of talk), when Helen pounces on them.

A hand dropped abrupt as iron on Rachel’s shoulder; it might have been a bolt from heaven. She fell beneath it, and the grass whipped across her eyes and filled her mouth and ears. Through the waving stems she saw a figure, large and shapeless against the sky. Helen was upon her. Rolled this way and that, now seeing only forests of green, and now the high blue heaven, she was speechless and almost without sense. At last she lay still, all the grasses shaken round her and before her by her panting. Over her loomed two great heads, the heads of a man and woman, of Terence and Helen.

It is not only the book’s strangest moment; it is also the book’s only scene of (implied) sexual congress, and it involves three people. For whatever it’s worth—I’m truly not sure how much it is or isn’t worth—Woolf spent most of her life bound up in threesomes, most prominently herself, Vanessa, and Vanessa’s husband, Clive Bell, and, some years later, herself, Leonard, and Vita Sackville-West.

Although in her work Woolf ignored sex to the greatest possible degree, and was skeptical of mysticism, she believed in an immense connectedness. As a writer she was deeply concerned not only with the kinship of people (she became friendly with E. M. Forster, who gave us the phrase “only connect”), but with simultaneity; with the fact that the world is made up of beings, human and animal, all living at once; that all are both related and utterly strange to one another; and that what connects them, most importantly, is the medium of time—the plain fact of finding themselves alive at the same moment; and then, somewhat altered, at the next moment; and the next and the next. She stringently rejected religion but flirted all her life with the notion of the soul or, if not the soul, a certain beingness that emanated from living and inanimate things; even from the earth itself. She made it her business to try to account not only for the movements of her characters’ flesh but the existence and interactions of their spirits in a world that also possessed a life of its own.

Here is Clarissa Dalloway one night on the Euphrosyne:

She then fell into a sleep, which was as usual extremely sound and refreshing, but visited by fantastic dreams of great Greek letters talking round the room, when she woke and laughed to herself, remembering where she was and that the Greek letters were real people, lying asleep not many yards away. Then, thinking of the black sea outside tossing beneath the moon, she shuddered, and thought of her husband and the others as companions on the voyage. The dreams were not confined to her indeed, but went from one brain to another. They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each others’ faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say.

If The Voyage Out is filled with early evidence of Woolf’s style and vision it is also full of the conflicts that would mark her life and work until the year both ended. Always, there is the question of whether women can survive, as intellectual and emotional beings, in society generally and in marriage in particular. If relatively few of Woolf’s women are unambiguously destroyed by marriage not one of them clearly benefits from it, and while she was too conscientious to simply present her women as the victims of tyrannical men they are often subject to a kind of erosion as their mates refuse, year after year, to take them quite fully seriously. In The Voyage Out Susan Warrington—not exactly young and less than beautiful, consecrated to the care of her ancient aunt—is rescued by Arthur Venning’s marriage proposal, and while the fate she’s escaped is clearly a grim one there’s no strong sense that the fate she’s headed for—a respectable little house outside London, a child or two—is a significant improvement.

Even the gentle, idealistic Terence, who is The Voyage Out’s most outspoken defender of women’s rights, is suspect. On one hand he says to Rachel, while he is courting her:

“Just consider: It’s the beginning of the twentieth century, and until a few years ago no woman had ever come out by herself and said things at all. There it was going on in the background, for all those thousands of years, this curious silent unrepresented life. Of course we’re always writing about women—abusing them, or jeering at them, or worshiping them; but it’s never come from women themselves. I believe we still don’t know in the least how they live, or what they feel, or what they do Precisely.… If I were a woman I’d blow some one’s brains out. Don’t you laugh at us a great deal? Don’t you think it’s all a great humbug?”

On the other hand, after he and Rachel are engaged, he begins to tease her, tellingly, about her piano-playing, and to urge her to get busy answering the congratulatory notes they’ve received. When she complains about the blandness of the notes, he lectures her on the virtues of the various women they know:

“… and Mrs. Thornbury too; she’s got too many children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone to the bad instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees—hasn’t she a kind of beauty—of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say? Isn’t she rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river going on and on and on?”

And he adds,

“By the way, Ralph’s been made governor of the Carroway Islands—the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn’t it?”

Men, it seems, even the most conscientious of them, are still prone to praise women as trees or rivers, and to report only on the careers of other men.

The Voyage Out is saturated with the tension between Woolf’s own desire to record the pure sensation of living, her desire to tell a story, and her desire to use her fiction to make potent arguments about serious questions.