She did not want to go on living, and yet she knew that she would” (p. 346).

When The Voyage Out was published in 1915 it was widely praised by reviewers. The Observer (April 4, 1915) noted, “There is something greater than talent that colors the cleverness of this book. Its perpetual effort to say the real thing and not the expected thing, its humor and its sense of irony ... among ordinary novels it is a wild swan among good grey geese.” E. M. Forster writing in the Daily News and Leader (April 8, 1915) said the book beautifully illustrated the truth that “it is for a voyage into solitude that man was created,” and added that the novel was “as poignant as anything in modern fiction.”

Woolf was warmed by this praise — she felt that she had finally established herself as a novelist. But her strong resemblance to Rachel poses a question: To what extent was the book autobiographical? Certainly Woolf shared many of Rachel’s traits; she had lost a mother at an early age, possessed a nervous and awkward public disposition, and displayed a general discomfort with sex. She also had similar feelings of unworthiness and confusion, as she wrote in a letter to her friend, “To be 29 and unmarried — to be a failure — childless — insane too, no writer” (Letters, p. 466). Like Rachel, Woolf wanted male companionship, but she didn’t know if she could ever surrender to marriage itself. When Leonard Woolf — Thoby’s old Cambridge friend who had just returned to England and joined the Bloomsbury fold — proposed marriage, she hesitated. In a letter to him she wrote of her concerns: “I go from being half in love with and wanting you to be with me always ... to the extreme of wildness and aloofness.... I feel no physical attraction in you” (Letters, p. 496). Her vacillation sounds much like Rachel’s own struggle to surrender to Terence.

In the end, however, Woolf made a marriage choice that was altogether different from Rachel’s. On August 10, 1912, Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf and became Virginia Woolf. Her marriage coincided with the finishing of the novel, but its publication had to be put off for more than a year because shortly after her honeymoon Woolf suffered a collapse. She had been pushing herself while writing the ending of The Voyage Out, going deep into her unconscious, and in so doing, according to her biographer Quentin Bell, she “had been playing with fire. She had succeeded in bringing some of the devils who dwelt within her mind hugely and gruesomely from the depths, and she had gone too far for comfort” (Bell, vol. 2, p. 42).

Anxious about her book’s reception and nervous about the sharing of such private, vulnerable feelings, Woolf again had a full-scale breakdown. Frightened of her illness, she attempted suicide by trying to overdose on Veronal, and Leonard had to keep her on round-the-clock supervision with a staff of nurses. For the next several years Woolf wavered in and out of mental illness. Finally, in 1917, she was pronounced cured and deemed able to return to her normal life. Although her nervous tensions and depression would reoccur throughout her life, Woolf didn’t have another full-scale breakdown until she was fifty-nine. This time fear of illness would conquer her and in a strange synchronicity with her first novel, Woolf would leave this world by drowning herself in a river. She left behind a suicide note for Leonard that echoed Hewet’s last line to Rachel, “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been” (Bell, vol. 2, p.