He takes a genuine interest in Rachel and her life. He displays real concern about women’s position in society. (Indeed, many of Terence’s feminist opinions are identical to Woolf’s own, and she would later make many of the same arguments in A Room of One’s Own.) He also appears to be well aware of the pitfalls of marriage — the ways in which husbands can dominate their wives — and he vows to be different. And yet Terence does seem to want to possess Rachel. Whenever she exhibits a desire to be independent, he becomes uncomfortable. If she withdraws from him to think her own thoughts or just to practice the piano, he can be angry or even insulting. Rachel is cognizant of Terence’s neediness — a neediness that is fuel for her own fears about marriage. But she also appears to be truly attracted to him, and to hope that they will be able to create some type of compromise.

Rachel and Terence’s ultimate declaration happens during a stop on a river expedition when they take a walk together into the wild jungle terrain. There, surrounded by the reverberations of trees that suggest the sounds of the sea, they are moved to confess their love. That night, when they are lying at separate ends of the boat, they both feel as if they were “sitting perfectly silent at the bottom of the world” (p. 269). They seem finally to have surrendered to each other, but they are united in a strange isolated place, a darkness akin to the bottom of the sea.

Helen has a strange and somewhat ambivalent response to the news of Terence and Rachel’s engagement and impending marriage, which occurs in one of the most discussed and ambiguous passages in the novel:

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 (p. 276).

As many critics have noted, it is very difficult to understand what is happening here. Is it a sexual embrace? A jealous attack by Helen? Or some strange coupling between Helen, Rachel, and Terence? In earlier versions of The Voyage Out the scene is less ambiguous as Helen physically tackles Rachel, straddles her, stuffs her mouth with seeds, and then demands that she surrender (see Melymbrosia:

An Early Version of “The Voyage Out,” p. 206). Helen appears to be modeled in part on Woolf’s sister Vanessa, and Mitchell Leaska in his book on Woolf entitled Granite and Rainbow has suggested that Woolf changed this passage in the published version because she was uncomfortable with what it revealed about herself and her sister. Virginia’s flirtation with Vanessa’s husband, Clive, had created a love triangle similar to Helen’s relationship with Terence and Rachel. Helen’s relationship with Rachel is more complex than a simple love triangle, however, because she views Rachel as both child and friend, lover substitute and sister, and sees Terence and Rachel as both her possession and her responsibility. Whatever Woolf’s reasons for altering the passage, though, what we are left with in the published version is the feeling that Rachel has experienced a kind of ecstasy, and indeed this wrangling is the closest the book ever gets to an actual sexual encounter.

The last section of the novel is the most harrowing and the most profoundly realized, as Rachel’s simultaneous struggle to love Terence, conquer her fears, and preserve her separate identity spirals to a devastating conclusion. Shortly after a tea at the hotel to celebrate her engagement with Terence, Rachel catches a fever, battles the illness, and then dies. Many readers and critics have deemed Rachel’s sudden death an implausible and unsatisfying leap in the story. But, as the deaths of Woolf’s siblings demonstrate, it was by no means improbable at that time for a young person to catch a fever and unexpectedly die. So, then, the question becomes this: Are Rachel’s fever and death justified in the world of the narrative?

In many ways, the answer is yes. For one thing, her fever seems to have a catalyst.