It is a testimony to Woolf’s confidence in her imagination that she did not hesitate to set the novel in a place she had never visited. (The farthest she ever traveled were a boat trip to Portugal and an expedition to Greece.) Woolf renders the landscape beautifully and imaginatively but, despite her critiques of British imperialism, takes little interest in the people the British are subjugating; the locals of South America are all but missing from the novel.

Helen and Ridley set up house with Rachel in a villa loaned by Helen’s brother, and Rachel’s informal education begins. While Ridley moves into the background, laboring through his translations of Pindar, Helen makes Rachel her project and in essence her substitute child, trying slowly to “enlighten her” through books and more essentially through conversation. Helen does her best to rectify years of miseducation and neglect. She teaches Rachel basic things, such as how babies are born and how to better interact with people, but in a letter to a friend Helen confides that her powers are limited: “I now pray for a young man to come to my help” (p. 92).

Helen’s prayers are answered right after she finishes the letter, when she and Rachel walk into town and stop at a hotel where most of the British stay. Standing just outside the windows in the dark they spy on the hotel guests socializing after dinner. A stocky young man, Terence Hewet, approaches the window. At first he appears to address the two women as he stares outside, but actually he is talking to another man hidden behind a curtain, his friend St. John Hirst. This strange interlude is prophetic: It offers Terence Hewet as the young man Helen has just prayed for, introduces light and darkness as a motif in Terence and Rachel’s relationship, and establishes a connection between Terence, Rachel, Helen, and St. John.

Woolf then shifts the narrative away from Rachel and Helen as she moves like a camera through the various bedrooms of the hotel and around the breakfast table the next morning, introducing us to a new, second tier of entertaining characters. Through her female characters Woolf gives an interesting overview of the different paths open to women. At one end of the spectrum is Miss Allan, the older spinster who must toil to support herself by teaching and writing literary surveys. At the other end is Susan Warrington, a young woman anxious to marry who has been brought on vacation by her sick aunt, the fussy Mrs. Paley. Complementing Susan is Evelyn, an incorrigible flirt who relishes marriage proposals but can’t seem to surrender her freedom and talks of relating to men as only friends. Finally, there are the married options: Mrs. Thornbury, the older wife and mother who babies her husband, and Mrs. Elliot, the childless wife of an Oxford don. Each woman seems slightly unsettled in her life, yet relieved she is not someone else. As Miss Allan leaves breakfast to go write, Mrs. Thornbury laments to Mrs. Elliot, “Unmarried women — earning their livings — it’s the hardest life of all” (p. 110).

The centerpiece of the novel and the crux of Rachel’s emotional journey is her romance with Terence Hewet. The romance appears to progress, like most relationships, through gradual stages of uncertainty and attraction and symbiosis, until finally they both declare their feelings and become engaged. But undercutting the relationship are Rachel’s anxieties about sex and men and her newfound desire to maintain a separate sense of self. These anxieties are expressed through the images of death and water that recur in this section of the novel.

But what of our hero, Terence? What sort of a man is he? And what is his part in the evolving romance? Initially he appears to be fairly good husband material. He is educated, experienced with women, and independently wealthy. He likes poetry and wants to be a writer.