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The Voyage Out
Woolf’s first novel is a haunting book, full of light and shadow. It takes Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose and their niece, Rachel, on a sea voyage from London to a resort on the South American coast. “It is a strange, tragic, inspired book whose scene is a South America not found on any map and reached by a boat which would not float on any sea, an America whose spiritual boundaries touch Xanadu and Atlantis” (E. M. Forster).
380 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1915
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About the author
Virginia Woolf
1,902 books29k followers(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
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June 28, 2017I’m sitting in front of my computer screen wondering which of several angles to choose in order to make this review something more than just another account of the plot and characters of The Voyage Out (1915).
My copy of the book is on the desk beside me and I’m sorting through the various passages I’ve underlined looking for the slant that will please me most. The following line describing leading character Helen Ambrose catches my eye: She had her embroidery frame set up on deck, with a little table by her side on which lay open a black volume of philosophy.
Helen Ambrose’s fictional existence is happening one hundred years before my real-life one but in some respects we aren’t very different. Like me, Helen is a middle-aged woman who reads a lot. Unlike me, Helen can’t share thoughts about books with the world via a computer screen; her book thoughts are kept within the confines of her mind while her creative urges are directed instead towards her embroidery screen. But Helen, as we soon find out, likes to do things differently, even when it comes to embroidery: she chose a thread from the vari-coloured tangle that lay in her lap, and sewed red into the bark of a tree, or yellow into a river torrent.
I’d like to think that Helen and I are a little alike in how we see the world; tree bark isn’t always brown nor rivers always blue, just as book reviews don’t always have to follow a standard format and limit themselves to summaries of the plot and lists of the characters.
If this book were a painting instead of a novel, it would be focused entirely on Helen so intrinsic to everything is her role in Woolf’s composition.
At times, and Helen’s embroidery is just one example, the themes, and the treatment of them, harken back to the nineteenth century. At other times, the thoughts and speeches which Woolf gives her characters, and Helen in particular, would not be out of place in a novel of the twenty-first century.
Woolf deliberately recalls nineteenth century novels to our attention, those of Jane Austin and Charlotte Brontë in particular; I’ve noted several examples in the updates. She even has the characters discuss Austen and Brontë at one point:
'Wuthering Heights! said Clarissa, 'Ah---that’s more in my line. I really couldn’t exist without the Brontës! Don’t you love them? Still, on the whole, I’d rather live without them than without Jane Austin.’
‘Jane Austin? I don’t like Jane Austin,’ said Rachel.
‘You monster!’ Clarissa explained. ‘I can only just forgive you. Tell me why?’
‘She’s so---so---well, so like a tight plait,’ Rachel floundered.
Rachel is Helen Ambrose’s twenty-something year-old niece and is herself a typical nineteenth century heroine: young, passionate, eager to fall in love, a Marianne Dashwood from Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, or, on a less passionate day, a Lucy Snowe from Brontë’s Villette. If this were an Austen novel, Rachel would be the central character and her meeting with the man she might marry would be the main event of the book.
But this is a Woolf novel, perched astride two centuries. It is Woolf’s first novel in fact, the idea for which she developed as early as 1905 when she herself was Rachel’s age but already seeing the world not as Rachel does but rather as the older, more free-spirited and less anchored-in-time character, Helen might. And, like Helen, Woolf looks forward in this book, not only towards the freedoms that women will gain in the twentieth century, but to her own novels yet to come. The Clarissa in the quote above is Clarissa Dalloway who will feature in Woolf’s fourth book, Mrs. Dalloway, alongside her husband Richard, mercifully given a more mute role in the later work than he has here. The other male characters in The Voyage Out are prototypes of Jacob Flanders from Jacob's Room, and Neville, Louis and Bernard from The Waves. There is also an artist character in The Voyage Out, a foreshadowing of Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. There are even hints of the exoticism of Orlando to be found here.
So The Voyage Out is a one-way voyage in several senses; not only is it a one-way journey for the quasi-heroine Rachel, it is also a one-way trip away from the nineteenth century novel, outward bound towards what will become the twentieth-century novel as Woolf will very soon imagine it.
My copy of the book is on the desk beside me and I’m sorting through the various passages I’ve underlined looking for the slant that will please me most. The following line describing leading character Helen Ambrose catches my eye: She had her embroidery frame set up on deck, with a little table by her side on which lay open a black volume of philosophy.
Helen Ambrose’s fictional existence is happening one hundred years before my real-life one but in some respects we aren’t very different. Like me, Helen is a middle-aged woman who reads a lot. Unlike me, Helen can’t share thoughts about books with the world via a computer screen; her book thoughts are kept within the confines of her mind while her creative urges are directed instead towards her embroidery screen. But Helen, as we soon find out, likes to do things differently, even when it comes to embroidery: she chose a thread from the vari-coloured tangle that lay in her lap, and sewed red into the bark of a tree, or yellow into a river torrent.
I’d like to think that Helen and I are a little alike in how we see the world; tree bark isn’t always brown nor rivers always blue, just as book reviews don’t always have to follow a standard format and limit themselves to summaries of the plot and lists of the characters.
If this book were a painting instead of a novel, it would be focused entirely on Helen so intrinsic to everything is her role in Woolf’s composition.
At times, and Helen’s embroidery is just one example, the themes, and the treatment of them, harken back to the nineteenth century. At other times, the thoughts and speeches which Woolf gives her characters, and Helen in particular, would not be out of place in a novel of the twenty-first century.
Woolf deliberately recalls nineteenth century novels to our attention, those of Jane Austin and Charlotte Brontë in particular; I’ve noted several examples in the updates. She even has the characters discuss Austen and Brontë at one point:
'Wuthering Heights! said Clarissa, 'Ah---that’s more in my line. I really couldn’t exist without the Brontës! Don’t you love them? Still, on the whole, I’d rather live without them than without Jane Austin.’
‘Jane Austin? I don’t like Jane Austin,’ said Rachel.
‘You monster!’ Clarissa explained. ‘I can only just forgive you. Tell me why?’
‘She’s so---so---well, so like a tight plait,’ Rachel floundered.
Rachel is Helen Ambrose’s twenty-something year-old niece and is herself a typical nineteenth century heroine: young, passionate, eager to fall in love, a Marianne Dashwood from Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, or, on a less passionate day, a Lucy Snowe from Brontë’s Villette. If this were an Austen novel, Rachel would be the central character and her meeting with the man she might marry would be the main event of the book.
But this is a Woolf novel, perched astride two centuries. It is Woolf’s first novel in fact, the idea for which she developed as early as 1905 when she herself was Rachel’s age but already seeing the world not as Rachel does but rather as the older, more free-spirited and less anchored-in-time character, Helen might. And, like Helen, Woolf looks forward in this book, not only towards the freedoms that women will gain in the twentieth century, but to her own novels yet to come. The Clarissa in the quote above is Clarissa Dalloway who will feature in Woolf’s fourth book, Mrs. Dalloway, alongside her husband Richard, mercifully given a more mute role in the later work than he has here. The other male characters in The Voyage Out are prototypes of Jacob Flanders from Jacob's Room, and Neville, Louis and Bernard from The Waves. There is also an artist character in The Voyage Out, a foreshadowing of Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. There are even hints of the exoticism of Orlando to be found here.
So The Voyage Out is a one-way voyage in several senses; not only is it a one-way journey for the quasi-heroine Rachel, it is also a one-way trip away from the nineteenth century novel, outward bound towards what will become the twentieth-century novel as Woolf will very soon imagine it.
February 6, 2017
How flimsy are the accroutrements of civilisation in the face of nature.
It’s like it took Virginia a third of this novel to get out of her Victorian stays, chemises, petticoats and corsets. Once she shakes off all the Victorian trappings though she moves with beautiful poise and clarity of purpose. So, it’s quite heavy footed to begin with, not as modern in tone and treatment as Forster who had already written a couple of his novels when she wrote this. It’s as if Woolf has to free herself of tradition by first embracing it. She does this by creating a background cast of Victorian characters, elderly spinsters and erudite emotionally retarded elderly men and embarking on what seems a comedy of manners. Not perhaps Woolf’s forte – though, that said, it does have some fabulous comic moments and made me laugh out loud at least three times.
It’s clear Woolf couldn’t help thinking of the older generation as enemies and her foremost inclination is to ridicule them. This inclination muddies the early part of the novel a bit. Forster was better at characterising elderly interfering women, mainly because he sympathised with them and was able to write about them with tenderness as well as mockery whereas Woolf seems to find it difficult to overcome a snobbishly scornful point of view. Also, in the name of realism – we’re in a busy hotel - she duplicates characters which means it’s hard to differentiate some of the women. There are probably too many. Woolf is much more engaging in this novel when she’s writing about people of her own generation. In fact the novel becomes infinitely more compelling every time Rachel is its prevailing voice. There’s nothing of the comedy of manners genre about Rachel. Woolf is on the hunt for what’s fugitive about Rachel. Already there are signs of her ambition to write a new kind of biography which she was to achieve in such a brilliant and ground-breaking manner in The Waves.
The tone of the novel becomes kinder, warmer, when love arrives, the spinsters and middle aged married women are treated with more tenderness, and the novel improves massively as a result. If the first half was a three star read, the second half is a five star read.
It’s poignant that the young lover uses the exact same words to describe a relationship as Woolf herself was to use in her suicide note to Leonard. It also provides an insight into what Woolf herself went through as a young woman. I suspect the descriptions of Rachel’s illness were inspired by her own breakdowns. Thanks to Michael’s comment below I’ve been thinking about what Woolf says about love in this novel. Rachel offers lots of insights into Woolf herself, a woman who seemed to live without sexual passion. For Rachel love is like a river that takes her deeper inside herself; it doesn’t, as it does to most, bring her out of herself. It heralds a deeper silence rather than a louder singing. It’s closer to death than it is to life. It’s probably worth remembering Woolf had already attempted suicide before writing this. This might mean she had a greater need than most to believe in the transformative powers of love but at the same time less faith in those powers. I thought the last two chapters were incredibly powerful and haunting – and perhaps a little depressing - as an attempt to examine the testament of love. Brings me back again to her suicide note to Leonard – “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” And yet these were two people who had never made love. All Woolf’s romantic conflicts are encapsulated in that one line.
It’s been a long time since I read this. I was surprised by how good it is. Especially the second half, the depiction of young love and illness, which is inspired. Lovely to renew my twenty-year-old love affair with Virginia Woolf.
It’s like it took Virginia a third of this novel to get out of her Victorian stays, chemises, petticoats and corsets. Once she shakes off all the Victorian trappings though she moves with beautiful poise and clarity of purpose. So, it’s quite heavy footed to begin with, not as modern in tone and treatment as Forster who had already written a couple of his novels when she wrote this. It’s as if Woolf has to free herself of tradition by first embracing it. She does this by creating a background cast of Victorian characters, elderly spinsters and erudite emotionally retarded elderly men and embarking on what seems a comedy of manners. Not perhaps Woolf’s forte – though, that said, it does have some fabulous comic moments and made me laugh out loud at least three times.
It’s clear Woolf couldn’t help thinking of the older generation as enemies and her foremost inclination is to ridicule them. This inclination muddies the early part of the novel a bit. Forster was better at characterising elderly interfering women, mainly because he sympathised with them and was able to write about them with tenderness as well as mockery whereas Woolf seems to find it difficult to overcome a snobbishly scornful point of view. Also, in the name of realism – we’re in a busy hotel - she duplicates characters which means it’s hard to differentiate some of the women. There are probably too many. Woolf is much more engaging in this novel when she’s writing about people of her own generation. In fact the novel becomes infinitely more compelling every time Rachel is its prevailing voice. There’s nothing of the comedy of manners genre about Rachel. Woolf is on the hunt for what’s fugitive about Rachel. Already there are signs of her ambition to write a new kind of biography which she was to achieve in such a brilliant and ground-breaking manner in The Waves.
The tone of the novel becomes kinder, warmer, when love arrives, the spinsters and middle aged married women are treated with more tenderness, and the novel improves massively as a result. If the first half was a three star read, the second half is a five star read.
It’s poignant that the young lover uses the exact same words to describe a relationship as Woolf herself was to use in her suicide note to Leonard. It also provides an insight into what Woolf herself went through as a young woman. I suspect the descriptions of Rachel’s illness were inspired by her own breakdowns. Thanks to Michael’s comment below I’ve been thinking about what Woolf says about love in this novel. Rachel offers lots of insights into Woolf herself, a woman who seemed to live without sexual passion. For Rachel love is like a river that takes her deeper inside herself; it doesn’t, as it does to most, bring her out of herself. It heralds a deeper silence rather than a louder singing. It’s closer to death than it is to life. It’s probably worth remembering Woolf had already attempted suicide before writing this. This might mean she had a greater need than most to believe in the transformative powers of love but at the same time less faith in those powers. I thought the last two chapters were incredibly powerful and haunting – and perhaps a little depressing - as an attempt to examine the testament of love. Brings me back again to her suicide note to Leonard – “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” And yet these were two people who had never made love. All Woolf’s romantic conflicts are encapsulated in that one line.
It’s been a long time since I read this. I was surprised by how good it is. Especially the second half, the depiction of young love and illness, which is inspired. Lovely to renew my twenty-year-old love affair with Virginia Woolf.
November 4, 2025
Virginia Woolf writes her stories like no other. They are never plot-driven but are almost always centered around the characters and their inner thoughts and psychologies. This very feature has both attracted and deterred the reader. I belong to the former category. I love the way Virginia penetrates deeper into her characters, exposing their inner thoughts and showing what leads to their different character traits. In this way, she breathes life into her characters. They become real in the eyes of the readers so, connecting with them is smooth and natural. Also, Virginia's writing is like that of no other. Heavenly is no exaggeration to describe it. As I've mentioned in my reviews of her books, she takes me to another realm with her poetic prose and her clever metaphors. They talk to some inner part of me that has no connection with the work at hand. Her rhythm of writing calms me, and her every word pleases me. When I'm in a turbulent mood, she brings me peace.
Virginia's stories are quite unusual. Their brilliance lies in their depth. In every work of hers, she goes on in search of life and its true spirit. In The Voyage Out, young Rachel Vinrace, temporarily freed from her protected environment, goes on a "voyage" in search of the meaning of her life. Stepping onto the world suddenly, Rachel discovers that she is unable to connect with it. Her timidity and shyness prevent her from making any closer acquaintances, and the lack of her personal development makes her awkward. Yet, her clever instincts and her power of observation help her understand and connect with the world and people around her enough to find love, happiness, and contentment. Although she doesn't fully realize her expectations due to tragic circumstances, she learns enough of her true self to find inner peace and contentment. But this story doesn't belong to Rachel Vinrace alone. It also belongs to Helen, Terrence, St. John, Evelyn, and all the rest. Like Rachel, they too, with their different backgrounds, education, age, and gender, are searching for the meaning of life and seeking their place in the world.
The story is tragic, and the tone is melancholic. It is depressing, yet at the same time, curiously soothing. It amazes me how Virginia arouses opposing emotions through her writing. It shows her extraordinary gift in literary craftsmanship.
The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf's first novel. Even then she has been quite obsessed with the "voyage" to find the true meaning and true path in life. In the story, her characters take on a physical voyage from their home in England to South America. While on this physical voyage out, interacting with one another, they also take on a voyage out into their inner selves, questioning, and re-questioning who they truly are. The physical and mental "voyages" complement and completes each other and produces one journey in search of self. Virginia's ability to strike this physical and mental balance in her very first work says a lot about her potential, which was fully developed later.
The book was written at the beginning of Virginia's own voyage to find her true place in the world of literature, while she was discovering and realizing her full potential as an author. As her first major literary product, the novel deserves credit.
More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/
Virginia's stories are quite unusual. Their brilliance lies in their depth. In every work of hers, she goes on in search of life and its true spirit. In The Voyage Out, young Rachel Vinrace, temporarily freed from her protected environment, goes on a "voyage" in search of the meaning of her life. Stepping onto the world suddenly, Rachel discovers that she is unable to connect with it. Her timidity and shyness prevent her from making any closer acquaintances, and the lack of her personal development makes her awkward. Yet, her clever instincts and her power of observation help her understand and connect with the world and people around her enough to find love, happiness, and contentment. Although she doesn't fully realize her expectations due to tragic circumstances, she learns enough of her true self to find inner peace and contentment. But this story doesn't belong to Rachel Vinrace alone. It also belongs to Helen, Terrence, St. John, Evelyn, and all the rest. Like Rachel, they too, with their different backgrounds, education, age, and gender, are searching for the meaning of life and seeking their place in the world.
The story is tragic, and the tone is melancholic. It is depressing, yet at the same time, curiously soothing. It amazes me how Virginia arouses opposing emotions through her writing. It shows her extraordinary gift in literary craftsmanship.
The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf's first novel. Even then she has been quite obsessed with the "voyage" to find the true meaning and true path in life. In the story, her characters take on a physical voyage from their home in England to South America. While on this physical voyage out, interacting with one another, they also take on a voyage out into their inner selves, questioning, and re-questioning who they truly are. The physical and mental "voyages" complement and completes each other and produces one journey in search of self. Virginia's ability to strike this physical and mental balance in her very first work says a lot about her potential, which was fully developed later.
The book was written at the beginning of Virginia's own voyage to find her true place in the world of literature, while she was discovering and realizing her full potential as an author. As her first major literary product, the novel deserves credit.
More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/
March 10, 2019
Three things happened to me while voyaging on the underground because of this book:
1) As I admire Virginia Woolf immensely and identify with her issues and topics, I tried very hard to concentrate deeply enough to be able to read in a very distractive environment - squished into a full train.
I fought against all odds to read the following paragraph:
"She was deep in the fifth book, stopping indeed to pencil a note, when a pair of boots dropped, one after another, on the floor above her. She looked up and speculated. Whose boots were they, she wondered. She then became aware of a swishing sound next door - a woman clearly, putting away her dress. It was succeeded by a gentle tapping sound, such as that which accompanies hairdressing. It was very difficult to keep the attention fixed on "The Prelude". Was it Susan Warrington tapping? She forced herself, however, to read to the end of the book, when she placed a mark between the pages, sighed contentedly, and then turned out the light."
At this point I close my book, and say to Virginia Woolf in my head that I actually had more distraction than her character, but still managed to finish the paragraph before looking up. When I do, triumphantly, I realise I have missed my station. We just travel so much faster than in 1915! But we get equally annoyed when we are off track, so I guess it is more a change of transportation technology than one in human character!
2) Despite the annoying extra tour the other day, I continue to read "A Voyage Out" while commuting. I am most definitely the only person reading a book on the train, while everybody else is using a smartphone for various kinds of entertainment - almost anything actually except talking - which was its only purpose not that long ago. In the calm and quiet train where people mutely play phone (phony) games, I can't help bursting out laughing, very loudly, reading this:
"One can be very nice without having read a book, she asserted."
I did not dare being honest with the (nice) person who politely asked what I thought was so funny.
3) After missing my train station once and drawing attention to myself by inappropriate, lonely (loony) laughter, I became more cautious while reading in public. But today, I embarked on the last chapters, and there are things you can't help if you have got to know characters closely, and they all of a sudden die on you! So I sat on the train, crying, tears ruining my make-up and making my immediate environment incredibly uncomfortable. Which led me to reflect that we are not that much better at dealing with people's emotions nowadays than the famously uptight Belle Epoque society I was reading about!
So let's just say that I have taken "The Voyage Out" on a journey of its own, exposed it to the society in which I live and breathe and read. And when it comes to characters, plots and settings, I find Virginia's universe still quite intact, despite our advanced technology. More than once, I thought of what she would have written about my contemporaries, who try to "open my mind to the modern world" in the same way the Dalloways and other socialites try to "open" the erudite Oxbridge minds of that time, who unfortunately do not know how o dress for dinner.
More than once, this book sent me on literary voyages out, following the idea from A Room of One's Own:
"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately!"
When one of the characters quotes Shakespeare's line "Fathom Five Thy Father Lies", I can't remember which play it is from, and while checking that, I stumble upon Sylvia Plath's "Fathom Five" before finding "The Tempest", so that one line in Virginia Woolf makes me embark on a voyage to revisit two other cherished authors before returning to my main reading focus.
The world of the Belle Epoque is painted in all its splendour and natural self-confidence while containing all the signs of a world soon to be changed forever by World War I. This truly is a novel of modernity in the making, showing the old values still in place, but questioned more and more. Just like Philip Carey in Of Human Bondage, published the same year, the characters increasingly see life as something without greater purpose, something meaningless and thrilling at the same time.
When Clarissa Dalloway exclaims: "How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!" that resonates with our time's craving for interesting crime rather than virtuous mediocrity. But it also shows the strange carelessness which is a prelude to the highly unnecessary Great War. The novel was begun in 1907, at the time when Picasso experimented with the break-up of the traditional correspondence between colour and form and object, most notably evident in "The Demoiselles D'Avignon". This development towards a new interpretation of the world is very much visible in "The Voyage Out" as well, where many facets, colours and ideas are brought together in a painting of a society in a state of change.
I thoroughly enjoyed being part of this journey towards modernism!
1) As I admire Virginia Woolf immensely and identify with her issues and topics, I tried very hard to concentrate deeply enough to be able to read in a very distractive environment - squished into a full train.
I fought against all odds to read the following paragraph:
"She was deep in the fifth book, stopping indeed to pencil a note, when a pair of boots dropped, one after another, on the floor above her. She looked up and speculated. Whose boots were they, she wondered. She then became aware of a swishing sound next door - a woman clearly, putting away her dress. It was succeeded by a gentle tapping sound, such as that which accompanies hairdressing. It was very difficult to keep the attention fixed on "The Prelude". Was it Susan Warrington tapping? She forced herself, however, to read to the end of the book, when she placed a mark between the pages, sighed contentedly, and then turned out the light."
At this point I close my book, and say to Virginia Woolf in my head that I actually had more distraction than her character, but still managed to finish the paragraph before looking up. When I do, triumphantly, I realise I have missed my station. We just travel so much faster than in 1915! But we get equally annoyed when we are off track, so I guess it is more a change of transportation technology than one in human character!
2) Despite the annoying extra tour the other day, I continue to read "A Voyage Out" while commuting. I am most definitely the only person reading a book on the train, while everybody else is using a smartphone for various kinds of entertainment - almost anything actually except talking - which was its only purpose not that long ago. In the calm and quiet train where people mutely play phone (phony) games, I can't help bursting out laughing, very loudly, reading this:
"One can be very nice without having read a book, she asserted."
I did not dare being honest with the (nice) person who politely asked what I thought was so funny.
3) After missing my train station once and drawing attention to myself by inappropriate, lonely (loony) laughter, I became more cautious while reading in public. But today, I embarked on the last chapters, and there are things you can't help if you have got to know characters closely, and they all of a sudden die on you! So I sat on the train, crying, tears ruining my make-up and making my immediate environment incredibly uncomfortable. Which led me to reflect that we are not that much better at dealing with people's emotions nowadays than the famously uptight Belle Epoque society I was reading about!
So let's just say that I have taken "The Voyage Out" on a journey of its own, exposed it to the society in which I live and breathe and read. And when it comes to characters, plots and settings, I find Virginia's universe still quite intact, despite our advanced technology. More than once, I thought of what she would have written about my contemporaries, who try to "open my mind to the modern world" in the same way the Dalloways and other socialites try to "open" the erudite Oxbridge minds of that time, who unfortunately do not know how o dress for dinner.
More than once, this book sent me on literary voyages out, following the idea from A Room of One's Own:
"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately!"
When one of the characters quotes Shakespeare's line "Fathom Five Thy Father Lies", I can't remember which play it is from, and while checking that, I stumble upon Sylvia Plath's "Fathom Five" before finding "The Tempest", so that one line in Virginia Woolf makes me embark on a voyage to revisit two other cherished authors before returning to my main reading focus.
The world of the Belle Epoque is painted in all its splendour and natural self-confidence while containing all the signs of a world soon to be changed forever by World War I. This truly is a novel of modernity in the making, showing the old values still in place, but questioned more and more. Just like Philip Carey in Of Human Bondage, published the same year, the characters increasingly see life as something without greater purpose, something meaningless and thrilling at the same time.
When Clarissa Dalloway exclaims: "How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!" that resonates with our time's craving for interesting crime rather than virtuous mediocrity. But it also shows the strange carelessness which is a prelude to the highly unnecessary Great War. The novel was begun in 1907, at the time when Picasso experimented with the break-up of the traditional correspondence between colour and form and object, most notably evident in "The Demoiselles D'Avignon". This development towards a new interpretation of the world is very much visible in "The Voyage Out" as well, where many facets, colours and ideas are brought together in a painting of a society in a state of change.
I thoroughly enjoyed being part of this journey towards modernism!
July 25, 2015
Rachel Vinrace sets out on a voyage from the confines of her home in England, where she is raised by her spinster aunts, to the exotic coast of South America in the early twentieth century. But more than just the physical journey from one shore to another, The Voyage Out is a story of the transformation of this essentially unworldly girl to a more self-possessed woman in love with the seemingly enlightened yet searching young writer, Terence Hewet. Some of the most lovely and illuminating writing flowed from Virginia Woolf’s hand as she wrote the words to describe the conversations as well as the innermost thoughts of her characters. Rachel reflects on her feelings as she sits in the room where she attended her first dance as a yet inexperienced girl at the South American hotel: “She could hardly believe it was the same room. It had looked so bare and so bright and formal on that night when they came into it out of the darkness… now the room was dim and quiet, and beautiful silent people passed through it… the methods by which she had reached her present position, seemed to her very strange, and the strangest thing about them was that she had not known where they were leading her. That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret… but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.”
When I first started reading The Voyage Out, I was not sure I would like it. Initially, I had a bit of difficulty keeping the various characters and names straight in my head. I wasn’t sure about them- I didn’t know if I liked any of them. But, as the ship reached the shore and each character was drawn so meaningfully, I was hooked. Feminism and the constraints faced by women during this time, marriage, and the individuality of persons are all issues examined very thoroughly here. Each person, man or woman, has his or her own struggles to which we become privy. Evelyn, another tormented young woman, is distressed over multiple marriage proposals and the desire to remain independent. “I thought the other day on that mountain how I’d have liked to be one of those colonists, to cut down trees and make laws and all that, instead of fooling about with all these people who think one’s just a pretty young lady. Though I’m not. I really must do something.” Surely, Evelyn was one of many women to suffer due to the barriers placed on her gender. Women are not the only ones here that agonize over life choices, self-examination, and the pursuit of happiness. As Hewet realizes he has fallen in love with Rachel, he frequently broods over his ideas surrounding the institution of marriage. He draws various pictures in his mind of married couples sitting together in a firelit room. “These pictures were very unpleasant… He tried all sorts of pictures, taking them from the lives of friends of his, for he knew many different married couples…When, on the other hand, he began to think of unmarried people, he saw them active in an unlimited world; above all, standing on the same ground as the rest, without shelter or advantage. All the most individual and humane of his friends were bachelors and spinsters."
Complex characters, vivid and beautiful descriptions of the exotic surroundings, and very real human internal struggles all make for a brilliant novel that one should savor slowly and thoroughly. Ms. Woolf has left me wanting more and wondering how and when we can truly achieve personal peace and happiness. I believe this is a question she could not quite answer herself. I plan to read more of her work to see if she can shed any more light on this human voyage.
When I first started reading The Voyage Out, I was not sure I would like it. Initially, I had a bit of difficulty keeping the various characters and names straight in my head. I wasn’t sure about them- I didn’t know if I liked any of them. But, as the ship reached the shore and each character was drawn so meaningfully, I was hooked. Feminism and the constraints faced by women during this time, marriage, and the individuality of persons are all issues examined very thoroughly here. Each person, man or woman, has his or her own struggles to which we become privy. Evelyn, another tormented young woman, is distressed over multiple marriage proposals and the desire to remain independent. “I thought the other day on that mountain how I’d have liked to be one of those colonists, to cut down trees and make laws and all that, instead of fooling about with all these people who think one’s just a pretty young lady. Though I’m not. I really must do something.” Surely, Evelyn was one of many women to suffer due to the barriers placed on her gender. Women are not the only ones here that agonize over life choices, self-examination, and the pursuit of happiness. As Hewet realizes he has fallen in love with Rachel, he frequently broods over his ideas surrounding the institution of marriage. He draws various pictures in his mind of married couples sitting together in a firelit room. “These pictures were very unpleasant… He tried all sorts of pictures, taking them from the lives of friends of his, for he knew many different married couples…When, on the other hand, he began to think of unmarried people, he saw them active in an unlimited world; above all, standing on the same ground as the rest, without shelter or advantage. All the most individual and humane of his friends were bachelors and spinsters."
Complex characters, vivid and beautiful descriptions of the exotic surroundings, and very real human internal struggles all make for a brilliant novel that one should savor slowly and thoroughly. Ms. Woolf has left me wanting more and wondering how and when we can truly achieve personal peace and happiness. I believe this is a question she could not quite answer herself. I plan to read more of her work to see if she can shed any more light on this human voyage.
February 1, 2026
The narrative begins with a crying scene by the Waterloo Bridge and somehow it sets an atmosphere for the entire novel…
Those teardrops are the tears of farewell… The crying woman will be a passenger among few others aboard the ship Euphrosyne, named after a goddess of grace and beauty… Her twenty-four-year-old inexperienced niece, Rachel is the heroine of the story…
Irony in the narration prevails… A bleak satire…
The voyage begins… In Lisbon two prominent passengers board the ship… Haughtiness is their way… Now the passengers make up a tiny closed society… The lady writes in her letter…
They disembark soon enough… At the end of the journey Rachel stays at her aunt’s villa… Guests in the hotel… Mosaic of their lives – their existence is empty… An outing in the mountains… Rachel meets a young man… A dance party… Nothing seems to go smoothly… A lot of misunderstanding…
Doom ruined the hopes of many a naive girl.
The fixity of her mood was broken by the action of walking. The shooting motor cars, more like spiders in the moon than terrestrial objects, the thundering drays, the jingling hansoms, and little black broughams, made her think of the world she lived in. Somewhere up there above the pinnacles where the smoke rose in a pointed hill, her children were now asking for her, and getting a soothing reply.
Those teardrops are the tears of farewell… The crying woman will be a passenger among few others aboard the ship Euphrosyne, named after a goddess of grace and beauty… Her twenty-four-year-old inexperienced niece, Rachel is the heroine of the story…
Her face was weak rather than decided, saved from insipidity by the large enquiring eyes; denied beauty, now that she was sheltered indoors, by the lack of colour and definite outline. Moreover, a hesitation in speaking, or rather a tendency to use the wrong words, made her seem more than normally incompetent for her years.
Irony in the narration prevails… A bleak satire…
The voyage begins… In Lisbon two prominent passengers board the ship… Haughtiness is their way… Now the passengers make up a tiny closed society… The lady writes in her letter…
Picture us, my dear, afloat in the very oddest ship you can imagine. It’s not the ship, so much as the people. One does come across queer sorts as one travels. I must say I find it hugely amusing. There’s the manager of the line – called Vinrace – a nice big Englishman, doesn’t say much – you know the sort. As for the rest – they might have come trailing out of an old number of Punch.
They disembark soon enough… At the end of the journey Rachel stays at her aunt’s villa… Guests in the hotel… Mosaic of their lives – their existence is empty… An outing in the mountains… Rachel meets a young man… A dance party… Nothing seems to go smoothly… A lot of misunderstanding…
She wanted to see Terence; she was perpetually wishing to see him when he was not there; it was an agony to miss seeing him; agonies were strewn all about her day on account of him, but she never asked herself what this force driving through her life arose from.
Doom ruined the hopes of many a naive girl.
January 29, 2022
القراءة الثانية لرواية فرجينيا وولف بالترجمة العربية
أول رواية للكاتبة وبداية لأدب مهتم بالمرأة وأحوالها الخاصة والمجتمعية
رحلة بطلة الرواية للخروج من عالمها الضيق المحدود
إلى عالم واسع عامر بالتجوال والمشاهدات واللقاءات
ومحاولات لم تكتمل لاكتشاف البشر والنفس والمشاعر المخفية
أول رواية للكاتبة وبداية لأدب مهتم بالمرأة وأحوالها الخاصة والمجتمعية
رحلة بطلة الرواية للخروج من عالمها الضيق المحدود
إلى عالم واسع عامر بالتجوال والمشاهدات واللقاءات
ومحاولات لم تكتمل لاكتشاف البشر والنفس والمشاعر المخفية
June 30, 2015
“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
― Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction
If we look at her works, what we evidently notice is that the idea which most engages Virginia Woolf is that of life itself. Life as it is witnessed every day, the transition from one moment to the other and everything that comes in between. A life not symmetrically arranged in a destined pattern but lived in the consciousness enfolding it. A life gleaming in the perception of fleeting flashes. A life resonating with ripples of thoughts, dispersing and then converging with other thoughts, forming a current creating eddies one moment and in other letting the stream run swiftly along the way. A life pounding with emotions: a relentless cascade from one end to the other.
In her first novel Virginia sets on a voyage to discover this idea, to understand her own relation with the notions lying concealed underneath mind and constituting life, her relation with people in her life, with a world largely unfamiliar till her twenties or with the notions like relation between men and women, a woman’s position in society, happiness, beauty, time, space and delirium. And though one misses her masterful strokes visible much clearly in her later works, one cannot help but admire the efforts undertaken during her first excursion.
When she speaks of the room to be provided to Rachel during her stay with the Ambroses at the island, we perceive the outline for a need of having a room for oneself:
“Among the promises which Mrs. Ambrose had made her niece should she stay was a room cut off from the rest of the house, large, private—a room in which she could play, read, think, defy the world, a fortress as well as a sanctuary. Rooms, she knew, became more like worlds than rooms at the age of twenty-four. Her judgment was correct, and when she shut the door Rachel entered an enchanted place, where the poets sang and things fell into their right proportions.”
Hewet’s conversation with Rachel about women brings forth Woolf’s deliberation on the discrimination that women were subjected to in the society:
“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 worshipping 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.”
One’s inescapable relation with time, whether exterior or interior time, which figures so prominently in her later works is also dealt with here:
“As midday drew on, and the sun beat straight upon the roof, an eddy of great flies droned in a circle; iced drinks were served under the palms; the long blinds were pulled down with a shriek, turning all the light yellow. The clock now had a silent hall to tick in, and an audience of four or five somnolent merchants. By degrees white figures with shady hats came in at the door, admitting a wedge of the hot summer day, and shutting it out again. After resting in the dimness for a minute, they went upstairs. Simultaneously, the clock wheezed one, and the gong sounded, beginning softly, working itself into a frenzy, and ceasing. There was a pause. Then all those who had gone upstairs came down; cripples came, planting both feet on the same step lest they should slip; prim little girls came, holding the nurse's finger; fat old men came still buttoning waistcoats. The gong had been sounded in the garden, and by degrees recumbent figures rose and strolled in to eat, since the time had come for them to feed again.”
Her love for circles and eddies is quite clearly manifested as there are not only direct references in some scenes e.g. in dance scene at the party in the hotel but also where we are made to go round and round in the mind of one character or swirled from the mind of one character to the other, though it lacks her signature deftness since this shifting is mostly aided through a third person narrative using a direct style. Regardless, it doesn’t impede the narration. The only hitch in the novel, as far as her writing is concerned I believe, is the part where Rachel and Hewet’s relation post engagement is portrayed because here Woolf seems to be struggling, almost dragging her words.
There is also a passing reference to the group of Bloomsbury and to Mrs. Dalloway’s love of flowers. And while reader is smitten, wondering how Virginia gives a little of herself to each of her characters, there comes the final convergence - death of Rachel. The depiction of Rachel’s state of delirium towards the end is so vivid as to be suggestive of Virginia’s own scuffle but what is more absorbing is Virginia’s attempt at bringing the characters together, through their thoughts, after Rachel’s death. Here too she seems to be engaging, with the process of “tunneling” which she exercised comprehensively in Mrs. Dalloway.
It is worthwhile going through the journey of reading her first novel because it does, in so many ways, make one feel closer to the wonderful writer while providing more insight into her person and into the ideas that defined her life and her works.
July 28, 2022
"To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently. It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for."
As this is Virginia Woolf's very first novel, I'm not sure just what I was expecting here. Woolf is a favourite author of mine, with her unique style capturing me rather early on. I didn't enjoy this as much as A Room of One's Own, but this was still a notable work of Woolf's, and one that is exquisitely written.
The story is about a voyage from England to South America, so much of the story is based upon the actual ship, then some of it at a hotel in South America. The Voyage Out primarily tells Rachel's story, but we have lots of different and somewhat interesting characters to meet on the journey.
These characters have different traits which Woolf develops wonderfully, and we mainly learn these through the interactions these characters have about love, life, politics and even gender roles. Let's be honest; many of these issues are still issues today, especially the expectations of men and women. I loved how Woolf included all of this within her story. We are also introduced to Clarissa Dalloway, one of Woolf's most notable character's, and a one I'm looking forward to meeting in Mrs. Dalloway, later on this year.
Sometimes I noticed that Woolf shifts from one character to another rather rapidly, and at times, it is difficult to tell whom she is speaking of. I somehow got used to this, and tried not to let it ruin my overall enjoyment of the novel, although, I think this could bother some.
The beautiful imagery Woolf conjures up in the reader's mind is amazing. I loved how she describes the ship in particular, especially when the storm hits when crossing to South America. She really made me feel like I was actually there.
I find Woolf's style to be unique and invigorating, and this was a gorgeously written debut novel. I'm looking forward to my next adventure with her and I'm hoping that will be sooner, rather than later.
As this is Virginia Woolf's very first novel, I'm not sure just what I was expecting here. Woolf is a favourite author of mine, with her unique style capturing me rather early on. I didn't enjoy this as much as A Room of One's Own, but this was still a notable work of Woolf's, and one that is exquisitely written.
The story is about a voyage from England to South America, so much of the story is based upon the actual ship, then some of it at a hotel in South America. The Voyage Out primarily tells Rachel's story, but we have lots of different and somewhat interesting characters to meet on the journey.
These characters have different traits which Woolf develops wonderfully, and we mainly learn these through the interactions these characters have about love, life, politics and even gender roles. Let's be honest; many of these issues are still issues today, especially the expectations of men and women. I loved how Woolf included all of this within her story. We are also introduced to Clarissa Dalloway, one of Woolf's most notable character's, and a one I'm looking forward to meeting in Mrs. Dalloway, later on this year.
Sometimes I noticed that Woolf shifts from one character to another rather rapidly, and at times, it is difficult to tell whom she is speaking of. I somehow got used to this, and tried not to let it ruin my overall enjoyment of the novel, although, I think this could bother some.
The beautiful imagery Woolf conjures up in the reader's mind is amazing. I loved how she describes the ship in particular, especially when the storm hits when crossing to South America. She really made me feel like I was actually there.
I find Woolf's style to be unique and invigorating, and this was a gorgeously written debut novel. I'm looking forward to my next adventure with her and I'm hoping that will be sooner, rather than later.
August 19, 2015
"We may not always understand the pattern in front of us, Woolf seems to be saying, and we may spend the majority of our life isolated from others and trapped within our own experience, but only by reconnecting to the pattern through people and through art can we truly be alive," writes Pagan Harleman, the Woolf scholar who wrote this fascinating introduction to my Barnes and Noble Classics edition of The Voyage Out.
This voyage out really seems to be a voyage in, into the conscious choices of several people of different backgrounds and ideologies who find their lives entangled. The question is whether the voyage is good for all, as life is faced with interminable problems and dismal consequences, as Rachel experiences, once she leaves her sheltered life. We learn Newton's Law of Motion, in school, but we never truly process it:
You don't get climatic thought or action here (except for the vital scene towards the end and even that is arguably climatic) and I think this bothered me at first, for I was seeking some of the audacious consciousness of Night and Day. I wasn't too thrilled with Rachel, the main character, or with Helen Ambrose, her aunt, although Clarissa Dalloway's frankness and Evelyn's feministic views piqued my interest. Rachel is a woman on a quest to understand the world of male-female relationships that has been hidden from her by her protective father. Helen Ambrose is on some inward journey herself (alongside her scholar-husband), a journey seemingly projected onto her young niece; although you never truly get to understand Helen, or her fascination and flirtation with the young scholars Hirst and Hewett.
With Hewett and Rachel's interaction, there is a hint of Lawrence's technique in Women in Love, that useful and entertaining technique of having male characters with feministic meanderings. These characters may be easily forgotten but their stances on life are not, particularly when female characters stand in for subserviency. They prod, they question, they discover, and this obsession with meaning is appealing.
I read this novel once before, over a decade ago, but when I read it again, I applauded something I hadn't paid attention to before: Woolf's encapsulation of the smallness of one life, as relates to the vastness of the general concept of life. We are but specks on this great blanket called the universe, or "patches of light," as Rachel puts it, and ever so often we're faced with the painful reality of our somewhat insignificant existence. And yet there is much to live for, and so much to live through.
This voyage out really seems to be a voyage in, into the conscious choices of several people of different backgrounds and ideologies who find their lives entangled. The question is whether the voyage is good for all, as life is faced with interminable problems and dismal consequences, as Rachel experiences, once she leaves her sheltered life. We learn Newton's Law of Motion, in school, but we never truly process it:
He had never realized before that underneath every action, underneath the life of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to be able to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the edges of all action, eating away the lives of men and women.
You don't get climatic thought or action here (except for the vital scene towards the end and even that is arguably climatic) and I think this bothered me at first, for I was seeking some of the audacious consciousness of Night and Day. I wasn't too thrilled with Rachel, the main character, or with Helen Ambrose, her aunt, although Clarissa Dalloway's frankness and Evelyn's feministic views piqued my interest. Rachel is a woman on a quest to understand the world of male-female relationships that has been hidden from her by her protective father. Helen Ambrose is on some inward journey herself (alongside her scholar-husband), a journey seemingly projected onto her young niece; although you never truly get to understand Helen, or her fascination and flirtation with the young scholars Hirst and Hewett.
With Hewett and Rachel's interaction, there is a hint of Lawrence's technique in Women in Love, that useful and entertaining technique of having male characters with feministic meanderings. These characters may be easily forgotten but their stances on life are not, particularly when female characters stand in for subserviency. They prod, they question, they discover, and this obsession with meaning is appealing.
That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.
I read this novel once before, over a decade ago, but when I read it again, I applauded something I hadn't paid attention to before: Woolf's encapsulation of the smallness of one life, as relates to the vastness of the general concept of life. We are but specks on this great blanket called the universe, or "patches of light," as Rachel puts it, and ever so often we're faced with the painful reality of our somewhat insignificant existence. And yet there is much to live for, and so much to live through.
January 28, 2016
3.5 Hard for me to define my feelings on this novel, a stream of consciousness novel that has a great many characters. Woolf herself was an observer of people, of society and that is certainly apparent in her characters, their thoughts and the situations in which they find themselves. This is not an easy read, though it is a thought provoking one. One the one hand I am not sure that it needed as many characters as there were, made this more confusing than it needed to be. Some of the thoughts and conversations may not have had huge impact had they been deleted. My favorite parts were when they were still on the ship, felt I received a better feel for those characters, which was smaller, than I did with the larger cast later on. So I loved this first part and also found the party at the hotel very amusing. The appearance of the Dalloway on the ship was like a breath of fresh air.
Yet, there are many moments of brilliance, when a phrase or a description was just so perfect that one could recognize Woolf's genius. Women's roles, society expectations are all fodder for her ironic sense of humor. The unreal expectations of men and women relationships, their romantic viewpoints of love and a young girl just trying to figure out whom she is and her place in the world.
So all in all, not easy but glad I read it, it is certainly memorable, especially the ending which was a surprise I wasn't expecting.
Yet, there are many moments of brilliance, when a phrase or a description was just so perfect that one could recognize Woolf's genius. Women's roles, society expectations are all fodder for her ironic sense of humor. The unreal expectations of men and women relationships, their romantic viewpoints of love and a young girl just trying to figure out whom she is and her place in the world.
So all in all, not easy but glad I read it, it is certainly memorable, especially the ending which was a surprise I wasn't expecting.
January 9, 2023
That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.
This is another book that I bonded with more fully on a re-read (my original review is below). I think Woolf is a writer who we need to concentrate on fully in order to get into the flow of her prose and the luminosity of her vision - any distraction and the reader/book connection falters.
It's perhaps hard reading this text in 2023 to recall precisely how radical and bold a departure this was from the traditional Victorian/Edwardian traditions of English novelistic fiction - Woolf's own literary journey out and away from the conventions of Jane Austen, the Brontes and all the other canonical authors mentioned throughout the book. Her analysis of character, for example, in her often-quoted essay 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown' describes the moral/materialist techniques of Arnold Bennett and his writerly peers, and then comments ironically on their import through the thoughts of Helen: 'She had dwelt so often upon Mr Hewet's prospects, his profession, his birth, appearance, and temperament, that she had almost forgotten what he was really like' (Ch.23).
This exploration of how to understand and articulate characters without recourse to these traditional outward trappings, of how to express what a person 'was really like', minute by minute, is one which preoccupied Woolf. Here we see her moving away from omniscient commentaries of the factors quoted above, away from physical descriptions (what does Rachel look like? We only have the barest intimations but that doesn't prevent us from participating in her journey), away from schemas and moral diagrams, not wholly but in an experimental way.
The most conspicuous intervention is the curtailing of 'the marriage plot', the driver of so much Victorian/Edwardian fiction, especially, though hardly exclusively, when female characters are prominently featured. This is also a book that, despite two engagements, seems to centralise relationships between women. Helen seems as important to Rachel's development as Hewet and Hirst, and, previously, Mrs Dalloway as influential as Richard Dalloway, and for different reasons. Woolf's own troubled relationship to sex plays out in Rachel's tension between terror and desire when Richard Dalloway kisses her, and uses a model of Freudian unconscious to get beneath the surface of her characters.
So this isn't always completely successful and Woolf herself struggled with this book for years and was never wholly satisfied with it. But as a momentous departure for both Woolf's fictional oeuvre and a still-influential intervention in the traditions of English novel writing, this is bold, courageous and radical. And this time round, I also loved it as a piece of glorious writing that strives to textualise the very texture of life.
----------------------------------------------------
'You see, I'm not as simple as most women,' Evelyn continued. 'I think I want more. I don't know exactly what I feel.'
He sat by her, watching her and refraining from speech.
'I sometimes think I haven't got it in me to care very much for one person only. Some one else would make you a better wife. I can imagine you very happy with some one else.'
My least favourite of Woolf's novels to date, this is full of possibilities and potentialities, most of which don't come to fruition. Or do they? Does it even matter? If the point of life is the journey, not the arrival, then perhaps not.
Woolf's first novel, this feels like she's still trying to find her novelistic feet and narrative voice. Straddling the nineteenth-century rites-of-passage story, the courtship novel and something far more modern, this is about all kinds of journeys: the literal one from London to a strangely dreamlike South American town; the literary one from Austen (who is repeatedly present) to Woolf herself; the bildungsroman of Rachel Vinrace . The journeys out, in all cases, are one-way only - there's no going back for these passengers.
There are places where Woolf's trademark delicacy and sensitivity come to the fore, especially in the latter part of the book. Less successful, for me, are the comedy of manners sections which feel laboured rather than light, as do the passages foregrounding the pomposity and conservatism of characters like Richard Dalloway.
Interestingly, in Woolf's next book, Night and Day, she returns more fully to a quasi-Victorian narrative about women's marriage choices but messes it up nicely by placing it in a suffragette context.
So a novel which looks forward to Woolf's more sustained later fiction - the roaming PoV/stream-of-consciousness technique, the quest to convey the feeling of women's lives and the texture of living. Ultimately I found this a bit unsatisfyingly amorphous but there's better to come.
July 5, 2018
Overall I found the novel on second reading to be very good. The fully developed Woolfian sense of humor is here. In the early going the book doesn't seem at all inferior to later more experimental works. Though those later works are leaner, more engaged with how to represent cognition in a text. In the later works, too, there is a somewhat greater ability to condense events to the numinous moment. That's here, too, but I think such moments get a little lost in the somewhat larger, more expansive authorial voice.
There are some interesting lacunae throughout. In the opening shipboard section the author shows absolutely no activity on the part of what must be a vast ship’s crew. For a lover of Melville this seems to me a conspicuous deficit. Our upper-class travelers are often on deck, too, but they do not so much as even look up into the rigging! Yes, very odd. It's the same later when they board a steamboat to go up river into Heart of Darkness country. It’s almost as if the boat were supernaturally piloted. We see virtually none of the crew.
An interesting feature of the English abroad at this time was their intense clubbiness and unwillingness to mix with locals. As we were given nothing of what must have been a vibrant sailors’s life onboard, now we are given nothing of the Spanish and Indian populations that surround them in South America. When they decide to go see a native village it's more in the manner of an entertainment than a genuine reaching out for cross-cultural exchange. It’s a pass-time. I don' t believe these parallels are merely fanciful on my part. Moreover, the voyage out here becomes the voyage inward. There can be no question that Woolf is using the untamed wild here as a metaphor for a journey into the unknown reaches of psyche just as Conrad did.
In class-based Britain of the day (1913-15) I think there may have been a desire on Woolf’s part to write for a specific type of reader. I live in the U.S. where we don't have this particular kind of class system, and even in England it's now greatly diminished. Moreover, Woolf, at 33, her age when The Voyage Out was published, probably knew little about such people or practices and would have thus exposed a weakness of knowledge by writing about it. As the young and insecure pedant Hirst puts it: “Why do the lower orders do any of the things they do do? Nobody knows.” (p. 356) Also, I wonder if Woolf viewed her characters as occupying a higher realm of existence. As if she thought that by banishing the trivial she was elevating her story. If so, I think that such a blinkered view has worked against verisimilitude and gave the novel a cloistered feel.
There's a full scale descriptive level here unmatched in her later novels which I found very satisfying. Also, it struck me that there's something of E.M. Forster's novels here, too. I was particularly struck by the pseudo-philosophical exchanges between Hewet and Hirst. They reminded me very much of certain discussions in Howard's End (1910) between the Schlegel sisters--of course Forster was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. In addition, the group excursion to the mountaintop undertaken by Hewet reminds me enormously of the trip to the Malabar Caves in A Passage to India (1924). I should reread Forster on these points.
The social consciousness aspect of the novel is limited to women and their changing place in society. At the time of this novel's publication women did not have the vote in Britain. The author is particularly interested in women who break out of the mold traditional society has created for them. She is almost always quietly ironic on this point, rarely strident.
Rachel and her aunt, Helen, are on the side of enlightenment here though far from “liberated.” They are highly aware of their disadvantages (no college since their only purpose in life is to marry) and these limitations shape their worldview. They are both readers, both articulate, although Rachel is sometimes at a loss for words due to her inexperience. As we get further into the book she changes. She begins to find the words she needs. She begins to live for the first time in her life. But at 24 she doesn't know the facts of life!
Another character, Evelyn Murgatroyd, is perhaps more of the usual case. Since association with men is women's only perceived means of power Evelyn has become a bit imperious about what she sees as her advantages. She is a flirt and a tease who strings along two marriage proposals during the period of this story. There have been others before. She is not abhorred, however. I think Woolf sees the limitations of her upbringing and understands she is coping in the only way she can. That this way of coping plays into all the old stereotypes about stupid women and coquettes that the pseudo-intellectual and, one suspects, unknowingly closeted Hirst gives voice to, seems plausible.
I found the narrative on second reading to have less interest for me. The love story between Hewet and Rachel gets to be a slog. One understands why Woolf felt she had to include it, especially in a first novel, but even though she's able to bring much liveliness to the subject it is in the end familiar and much trodden ground. I find the general interactions among the English at the hotel to be far more entertaining than this love story, since it is in those situations that Woolf is her funniest. The exchanges between the old people at the hotel are often hysterically funny. The parts about Rachel's intellectual awakening, too, are far more interesting than the love story. We see what she's reading, (Edward Gibbon, William Cowper, Honoré Balzac), what she's playing (lots of Bach, Beethoven), for she is an accomplished pianist, etc.
I've come across a few mini-howlers. An untoward adverb here, in one instance, and a ridiculous, seemingly unconsidered sentence there. Though these are small flaws I can recall nothing like them in Woolf’s later novels. So the book is more traditional in structure, less innovative and more self-conscious than later works. The title essentially refers to life’s journey but especially to the new world of adulthood for Rachel and the younger characters, principally Hewet, Hirst, and the ever-dissatisfied and indecisive Evelyn.
Lastly, let it be noted that there is no sex. Some guarded lust but even this is minimal. I like that. No pneumatics. No humping. No thrusting or mounting. No entering him or her. Entering? What is he or she, the Mall of America? Enough with such conventions. A must read for fans of Virginia Woolf, but if you don’t intend to read all ten novels start with either To The Lighthouse or Orlando or Mrs. Dalloway.
There are some interesting lacunae throughout. In the opening shipboard section the author shows absolutely no activity on the part of what must be a vast ship’s crew. For a lover of Melville this seems to me a conspicuous deficit. Our upper-class travelers are often on deck, too, but they do not so much as even look up into the rigging! Yes, very odd. It's the same later when they board a steamboat to go up river into Heart of Darkness country. It’s almost as if the boat were supernaturally piloted. We see virtually none of the crew.
An interesting feature of the English abroad at this time was their intense clubbiness and unwillingness to mix with locals. As we were given nothing of what must have been a vibrant sailors’s life onboard, now we are given nothing of the Spanish and Indian populations that surround them in South America. When they decide to go see a native village it's more in the manner of an entertainment than a genuine reaching out for cross-cultural exchange. It’s a pass-time. I don' t believe these parallels are merely fanciful on my part. Moreover, the voyage out here becomes the voyage inward. There can be no question that Woolf is using the untamed wild here as a metaphor for a journey into the unknown reaches of psyche just as Conrad did.
In class-based Britain of the day (1913-15) I think there may have been a desire on Woolf’s part to write for a specific type of reader. I live in the U.S. where we don't have this particular kind of class system, and even in England it's now greatly diminished. Moreover, Woolf, at 33, her age when The Voyage Out was published, probably knew little about such people or practices and would have thus exposed a weakness of knowledge by writing about it. As the young and insecure pedant Hirst puts it: “Why do the lower orders do any of the things they do do? Nobody knows.” (p. 356) Also, I wonder if Woolf viewed her characters as occupying a higher realm of existence. As if she thought that by banishing the trivial she was elevating her story. If so, I think that such a blinkered view has worked against verisimilitude and gave the novel a cloistered feel.
There's a full scale descriptive level here unmatched in her later novels which I found very satisfying. Also, it struck me that there's something of E.M. Forster's novels here, too. I was particularly struck by the pseudo-philosophical exchanges between Hewet and Hirst. They reminded me very much of certain discussions in Howard's End (1910) between the Schlegel sisters--of course Forster was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. In addition, the group excursion to the mountaintop undertaken by Hewet reminds me enormously of the trip to the Malabar Caves in A Passage to India (1924). I should reread Forster on these points.
The social consciousness aspect of the novel is limited to women and their changing place in society. At the time of this novel's publication women did not have the vote in Britain. The author is particularly interested in women who break out of the mold traditional society has created for them. She is almost always quietly ironic on this point, rarely strident.
Rachel and her aunt, Helen, are on the side of enlightenment here though far from “liberated.” They are highly aware of their disadvantages (no college since their only purpose in life is to marry) and these limitations shape their worldview. They are both readers, both articulate, although Rachel is sometimes at a loss for words due to her inexperience. As we get further into the book she changes. She begins to find the words she needs. She begins to live for the first time in her life. But at 24 she doesn't know the facts of life!
Another character, Evelyn Murgatroyd, is perhaps more of the usual case. Since association with men is women's only perceived means of power Evelyn has become a bit imperious about what she sees as her advantages. She is a flirt and a tease who strings along two marriage proposals during the period of this story. There have been others before. She is not abhorred, however. I think Woolf sees the limitations of her upbringing and understands she is coping in the only way she can. That this way of coping plays into all the old stereotypes about stupid women and coquettes that the pseudo-intellectual and, one suspects, unknowingly closeted Hirst gives voice to, seems plausible.
I found the narrative on second reading to have less interest for me. The love story between Hewet and Rachel gets to be a slog. One understands why Woolf felt she had to include it, especially in a first novel, but even though she's able to bring much liveliness to the subject it is in the end familiar and much trodden ground. I find the general interactions among the English at the hotel to be far more entertaining than this love story, since it is in those situations that Woolf is her funniest. The exchanges between the old people at the hotel are often hysterically funny. The parts about Rachel's intellectual awakening, too, are far more interesting than the love story. We see what she's reading, (Edward Gibbon, William Cowper, Honoré Balzac), what she's playing (lots of Bach, Beethoven), for she is an accomplished pianist, etc.
I've come across a few mini-howlers. An untoward adverb here, in one instance, and a ridiculous, seemingly unconsidered sentence there. Though these are small flaws I can recall nothing like them in Woolf’s later novels. So the book is more traditional in structure, less innovative and more self-conscious than later works. The title essentially refers to life’s journey but especially to the new world of adulthood for Rachel and the younger characters, principally Hewet, Hirst, and the ever-dissatisfied and indecisive Evelyn.
Lastly, let it be noted that there is no sex. Some guarded lust but even this is minimal. I like that. No pneumatics. No humping. No thrusting or mounting. No entering him or her. Entering? What is he or she, the Mall of America? Enough with such conventions. A must read for fans of Virginia Woolf, but if you don’t intend to read all ten novels start with either To The Lighthouse or Orlando or Mrs. Dalloway.
October 9, 2020
Woolf's debut novel is arguably more brilliant than some writers' masterpieces. Even though it's not as striking as her later works, it's a solid and remarkable novel in its own right. It's a lot simpler and more conventional than her more famous works, it follows a straightforward linear storyline, and I think that's really good for a few reasons:
1) It let me sit back and just enjoy the flow without having to stretch my emotional, linguistic, and concentration capacities to the extreme (reading To The Lighthouse, for example, was as serious and draining a task as studying Biochemistry for the finals for me. Reading The Voyage Out was just reading for pleasure).
2) It lets you observe the process Woolf is going through as a novelist. Especially if you've read some of her later works, you'll see how she's experimenting with her writing and figuring out her style. Almost all characters in The Voyage Out are prototypes of Woolf's more famous characters from later works. Many ideas are introduced here that she explores later on in her writing.
Clarissa and Richard Dalloway are present as side characters (and they are very different from their future selves in Mrs Dalloway, one can clearly see Clarissa mature into the titular character in the later book) Terence, St. John and Ridley resemble The Waves' trio Bernard, Neville and Louis in many ways. Helen Ambrose gives off strong Mrs Ramsay vibes from To The Lighthouse (though I liked Helen's character a lot more), and so on. Struggling with identity is an idea that's touched upon here and Woolf explores it more deeply in Orlando.
3) Woolf's novels are mainly concerned with the experience of ordinary life as it's lived. They contain storylines and social opinions as well but the latter two are subtly woven into the prose and it's not easy to notice them right away (unless you closely follow the annotations and explanatory notes) But in The Voyage Out, there are clear distinctions between plotline, exploration of consciousness, and arguments about "important things". The many characters of the book do a great deal of thinking, pondering, feeling, and talking to each other (mostly about philosophy or politics of the day). There are pages when characters are ardently discussing something completely irrelevant to the "plot" but it doesn't feel out of place, because the book isn't centered on its plot anyway.
Themes, Plot, Characters
So in many ways, The Voyage Out is not as conventional as most novels (of the same era). No single character is in the spotlight. The plot is about a group of people who travel from England to a small village on the coast of the Amazon and their interactions. There are Helen Ambrose and her husband Ridley, a middle-aged couple, while Ridley shuts himself in his study reading Greek, Helen is a central character alongside Rachel, her niece. Rachel, a naive 24-year-old could resemble a typical victorian tragic heroine except that this is not an Austen novel and Rachel and her love affair with Terence Hewet (a typical preppy young man) is not the center of the story. There's St. John Hirst (another obnoxious preppy intellectual), and many other characters each of whom gets their fair share of plot. These characters constantly talk to each other about everything and anything: gossip, literature, music, embroidery, cooking, chess, and interestingly, women's rights. There are many debates about women's suffrage, intellectual and artistic capacity, and everything in between. Some of the characters are tyrannical misogynists (Mr Dalloway, you're disgusting) or just conventionally sexist in the old fashioned way (Ridley and most others) but some of them are actually outspoken defenders of women's rights and it's so interesting to think about their dialogues, as they probably reflect the opinions of the society in which Woolf lived (or at least the opinions of people with whom she interacted, who were a bunch of intellectuals, but anyway).
Take this for example:
It'd oddly satisfying to read this a hundred years later and be able to say: we got the vote, and we are in law courts and business offices, so suck on that, Hewet! But it's also depressing at the same time because some of the remarks are true, it did take a very long time for those changes and we still have a million problems left.
Prose
Then there's what I personally love and admire in Woolf's books: her prose and what she writes about. Her prose is, even in her debut novel, fluid and nearly flawless. Reading her has altered what I knew about the capacities of the English language, and I generally enjoy reading her prose for prose's sake. I could sit down and take in her sentences and appreciate them as they are. But I also enjoy what she writes about. She enters the consciousness of a character and explores their thoughts, random thoughts, mundane thoughts, as they come and go. She's often been accused of writing about "nothing at all", but I find it astonishing. From the introduction to my copy of The Voyage Out, here's a very good explanation: “Woolf was revolutionary in her shunning of the outwardly dramatic and her insistence on the inwardly dramatic—her implied conviction that what’s important in a life, what remains at its end, is less likely to be its supposed climaxes than its unexpected moments of awareness, often arising out of unremarkable experience, so deeply personal they can rarely be explained.”
Woolf affects me on a very deeply personal level as well, and I find it difficult to convey what I think (or rather, feel) about her books without starting to sound extremely snobbish. So please, go read Woolf for yourself, The Voyage Out is a very good place to start. I'll quote some of my favorite passages from the book.
***
Quotes:
–“All these sights and sounds appeared sinister and full of hostility and foreboding; together with the natives and the nurse and the doctor and the terrible force of the illness itself they seemed to be in conspiracy against him. They seemed to join together in their effort to extract the greatest possible amount of suffering from him. He could not get used to his pain, it was a revelation to him. He had never realised before that underneath every action, underneath the life of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to be able to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the edges of all action, eating away the lives of men and women. He thought for the first time with understanding of words which had before seemed to him empty: the struggle of life; the hardness of life. [...] How did they dare to love each other, he wondered; how had he himself dared to live as he had lived, rapidly and carelessly, passing from one thing to another, loving Rachel as he had loved her? Never again would he feel secure; he would never believe in the stability of life, or forget what depths of pain lie beneath small happiness and feelings of content and safety.”
–"But what I like about your face is that it makes one wonder what the devil you're thinking about."
–“He was too little interested to frame an opinion of his own. He put things away in his mind, as if one of these days he would think about them, but not now.”
–“Up and up the steep spiral of a very late Beethoven sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined staircase, energetically at first, then more laboriously advancing her feet with effort until she could go no higher and returned with a run to begin at the very bottom again.”
–“But filled with one of those unreasonable exultations which start generally from an unknown cause, and sweep whole countries and skies into their embrace, she walked without seeing.”
–“The ghost of a roar of laughter came out to them, and was drowned at once in the wind.”
–“Some said that the sky was an emblem of the life they had had; others that it was the promise of the life to come.”
1) It let me sit back and just enjoy the flow without having to stretch my emotional, linguistic, and concentration capacities to the extreme (reading To The Lighthouse, for example, was as serious and draining a task as studying Biochemistry for the finals for me. Reading The Voyage Out was just reading for pleasure).
2) It lets you observe the process Woolf is going through as a novelist. Especially if you've read some of her later works, you'll see how she's experimenting with her writing and figuring out her style. Almost all characters in The Voyage Out are prototypes of Woolf's more famous characters from later works. Many ideas are introduced here that she explores later on in her writing.
Clarissa and Richard Dalloway are present as side characters (and they are very different from their future selves in Mrs Dalloway, one can clearly see Clarissa mature into the titular character in the later book) Terence, St. John and Ridley resemble The Waves' trio Bernard, Neville and Louis in many ways. Helen Ambrose gives off strong Mrs Ramsay vibes from To The Lighthouse (though I liked Helen's character a lot more), and so on. Struggling with identity is an idea that's touched upon here and Woolf explores it more deeply in Orlando.
3) Woolf's novels are mainly concerned with the experience of ordinary life as it's lived. They contain storylines and social opinions as well but the latter two are subtly woven into the prose and it's not easy to notice them right away (unless you closely follow the annotations and explanatory notes) But in The Voyage Out, there are clear distinctions between plotline, exploration of consciousness, and arguments about "important things". The many characters of the book do a great deal of thinking, pondering, feeling, and talking to each other (mostly about philosophy or politics of the day). There are pages when characters are ardently discussing something completely irrelevant to the "plot" but it doesn't feel out of place, because the book isn't centered on its plot anyway.
Themes, Plot, Characters
So in many ways, The Voyage Out is not as conventional as most novels (of the same era). No single character is in the spotlight. The plot is about a group of people who travel from England to a small village on the coast of the Amazon and their interactions. There are Helen Ambrose and her husband Ridley, a middle-aged couple, while Ridley shuts himself in his study reading Greek, Helen is a central character alongside Rachel, her niece. Rachel, a naive 24-year-old could resemble a typical victorian tragic heroine except that this is not an Austen novel and Rachel and her love affair with Terence Hewet (a typical preppy young man) is not the center of the story. There's St. John Hirst (another obnoxious preppy intellectual), and many other characters each of whom gets their fair share of plot. These characters constantly talk to each other about everything and anything: gossip, literature, music, embroidery, cooking, chess, and interestingly, women's rights. There are many debates about women's suffrage, intellectual and artistic capacity, and everything in between. Some of the characters are tyrannical misogynists (Mr Dalloway, you're disgusting) or just conventionally sexist in the old fashioned way (Ridley and most others) but some of them are actually outspoken defenders of women's rights and it's so interesting to think about their dialogues, as they probably reflect the opinions of the society in which Woolf lived (or at least the opinions of people with whom she interacted, who were a bunch of intellectuals, but anyway).
Take this for example:
“I’m inclined to doubt that you’ll ever do anything even when you have the vote.” He looked at her reflectively. She appeared very smooth and sensitive and young. “It’ll take at least six generations before you’re sufficiently thick-skinned to go into law courts and business offices. Consider what a bully the ordinary man is,” he continued, “the ordinary hard-working, rather ambitious solicitor or man of business with a family to bring up and a certain position to maintain. And then, of course, the daughters have to give way to the sons; the sons have to be educated; they have to bully and shove for their wives and families, and so it all comes over again. And meanwhile there are the women in the background.… Do you really think that the vote will do you any good?”
It'd oddly satisfying to read this a hundred years later and be able to say: we got the vote, and we are in law courts and business offices, so suck on that, Hewet! But it's also depressing at the same time because some of the remarks are true, it did take a very long time for those changes and we still have a million problems left.
Prose
Then there's what I personally love and admire in Woolf's books: her prose and what she writes about. Her prose is, even in her debut novel, fluid and nearly flawless. Reading her has altered what I knew about the capacities of the English language, and I generally enjoy reading her prose for prose's sake. I could sit down and take in her sentences and appreciate them as they are. But I also enjoy what she writes about. She enters the consciousness of a character and explores their thoughts, random thoughts, mundane thoughts, as they come and go. She's often been accused of writing about "nothing at all", but I find it astonishing. From the introduction to my copy of The Voyage Out, here's a very good explanation: “Woolf was revolutionary in her shunning of the outwardly dramatic and her insistence on the inwardly dramatic—her implied conviction that what’s important in a life, what remains at its end, is less likely to be its supposed climaxes than its unexpected moments of awareness, often arising out of unremarkable experience, so deeply personal they can rarely be explained.”
Woolf affects me on a very deeply personal level as well, and I find it difficult to convey what I think (or rather, feel) about her books without starting to sound extremely snobbish. So please, go read Woolf for yourself, The Voyage Out is a very good place to start. I'll quote some of my favorite passages from the book.
***
Quotes:
–“All these sights and sounds appeared sinister and full of hostility and foreboding; together with the natives and the nurse and the doctor and the terrible force of the illness itself they seemed to be in conspiracy against him. They seemed to join together in their effort to extract the greatest possible amount of suffering from him. He could not get used to his pain, it was a revelation to him. He had never realised before that underneath every action, underneath the life of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to be able to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the edges of all action, eating away the lives of men and women. He thought for the first time with understanding of words which had before seemed to him empty: the struggle of life; the hardness of life. [...] How did they dare to love each other, he wondered; how had he himself dared to live as he had lived, rapidly and carelessly, passing from one thing to another, loving Rachel as he had loved her? Never again would he feel secure; he would never believe in the stability of life, or forget what depths of pain lie beneath small happiness and feelings of content and safety.”
–"But what I like about your face is that it makes one wonder what the devil you're thinking about."
–“He was too little interested to frame an opinion of his own. He put things away in his mind, as if one of these days he would think about them, but not now.”
–“Up and up the steep spiral of a very late Beethoven sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a ruined staircase, energetically at first, then more laboriously advancing her feet with effort until she could go no higher and returned with a run to begin at the very bottom again.”
–“But filled with one of those unreasonable exultations which start generally from an unknown cause, and sweep whole countries and skies into their embrace, she walked without seeing.”
–“The ghost of a roar of laughter came out to them, and was drowned at once in the wind.”
–“Some said that the sky was an emblem of the life they had had; others that it was the promise of the life to come.”
February 5, 2017
It was a pleasure to experience a precursor to Woolf’s genius, but the work is missing the cohesion and power of her later work. I did appreciated some of ironies and satirical takes on the British imperial outlook and its intrinsic classism and sexism of the time. But all that was fairly restrained. Still, it was fascinating to look for the truth behind the concept the “the child is the father of the man”, or woman in this case.
Middle-aged Helen Ambrose ambarks on a ocean excursion to South America with her husband Ridley, her 24-year old niece Rachel, and handful of other monied passengers. Though we are unmoored from London society and go to a place (possibly Brazil) with cultures and life forms exotic to their experience, their British sensibilities and trappings of civilization are largely hermetically sealed off. They are so concerned with their own habits of living, refined hobbies like reading Gibbon or Jane Austen, embroidery, and gossip that we are barely aware of the lower classes like servants and steamship crew, the nature of the flora and fauna of the New World, or the identity and character of the anonymous native people they visit on a riverboat outing. The fish out of water bring their own tanks.
Watching people departing on a ship is a common spur to the imagination of escaping the mundane. Turning the telescope the other way gives a different perspective. We get a surprise early on how someone as well-grounded as Helen can be disturbed with dark thoughts from her experience of departure:
The people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England. Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a very small island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned. …
There were the lights of the great theatres, the lights of the long streets, lights that indicated huge squares of domestic comfort, lights that hung high in air. No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze forever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.
But it doesn’t take long for her to get her sea legs. I love this window on how the mind can cohere itself in the face of the chaos in nature:
Choked by the wind their spirits rose with a rush, for on the skirts of all the grey tumult was a misty spot of gold. Instantly the world dropped into shape; they were no longer atoms flying in the void, but people riding a triumphant ship on the back of the sea. Wind and space were banished; the world floated like an apple in a tub, and the mind of man, which had been unmoored also, once more attached itself to the old beliefs.
At sea, it’s a challenge for the passengers to replicate the usual structures of class hierarchy, gender roles, and propriety. Yet they do succeed quite well at that. Women hang out with women discussing womanly concerns, and men jockey for respect on their triumphs at the reins of empire and quest for knowledge. A side trip to a Mediterranean port to give a ride to the Dalloways makes a lot of ripples. It was great to experience a prequel to these main characters for Woolf’s “Mrs.Dalloway.” Richard, a Minister of Parliament, seems otherworldly and inaccessible as a proper Edwardian. Rachel tries to draw him out on his wisdom and ends up the victim of a sudden kiss. It almost comic how the heroic master of human achievement can be so bumbling in his untamed lust. Clarissa I love as I did in her later rendition, so charming, empathetic, and self-deprecating. So bold to reach for some surprising and profound insight about human nature.
Life is a bit duller when we leave the Dalloways ashore and head out across the Atlantic. The search by Rachel and another passenger for a marriage prospect among the slim pickings aboard take center stage. Rachel at 24 is amazingly naïve about sexuality. Her main emotional outlet is through her music and she has severe challenges to formulating her feelings or discerning that of the inarticulate single men on the trip:
It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.
Helen is not really capable in mentoring Rachel on her quest for a husband as she has a rather jaded perspective:
When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness.
One of Rachel’s suitors, the scholarly Hirst is trying to write a proof of the existence of God. Fortunately for Rachel he proves a mental buffoon in his outlook about God’s creations:
“Oh, but we’re all agreed by this time that nature’s a mistake. She’s either very ugly, appallingly uncomfortable, or absolutely terrifying. I don’t know what alarms me most—a cow or a tree. I once met a cow in a field by night. The creature looked at me. I assure you it turned my hair grey. It’s a disgrace that the animals should be allowed to go at large.”
Terence Hewet is more promising as a sensitive soul and something of a poet and philosopher. But we almost want to warn Rachel away when he espouses typical views of the day about the capabilities of women:
The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women, have for men,” he went on. “I believe we must have the sort of power over you that we’re said to have over horses. They see us three times as big as we are or they’d never obey us. For that very reason, I’m inclined to doubt that you’ll ever do anything even when you have the vote.”
In private he writes:
Not really vainer than men. Lack of self-confidence at the base of most serious faults. Dislike of own sex traditional, or founded on fact? Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an optimist, because they don’t think. …Again, it’s the fashion now to say that women are more practical and less idealistic than men, also that they have considerable organizing ability but no sense of honour.
But I felt hope for the ability of Rachel to expand his imagination and alter his perspective:
“Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed entirely of vast blocks of matter, and that we’re nothing but patches of light—“ she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering over the carpet and up the wall—“like that?”
This is no romantic novel from Austen or a repeat of Conrad’s moralistic journey toward the “Heart of Darkness”, but instead a substantial step toward Modernist experimentation already afoot by the likes of Joyce. Woolf makes her plot take a tragic turn and then diffuses and defuses its impact with a swarm of secondary characters taking up life as usual. The execution of closure to her tale was baffling and dissatisfying to me, but overall I felt the promise of her future capability to expose the mind in action and elucidate the meanings of gender in the modern world..
Middle-aged Helen Ambrose ambarks on a ocean excursion to South America with her husband Ridley, her 24-year old niece Rachel, and handful of other monied passengers. Though we are unmoored from London society and go to a place (possibly Brazil) with cultures and life forms exotic to their experience, their British sensibilities and trappings of civilization are largely hermetically sealed off. They are so concerned with their own habits of living, refined hobbies like reading Gibbon or Jane Austen, embroidery, and gossip that we are barely aware of the lower classes like servants and steamship crew, the nature of the flora and fauna of the New World, or the identity and character of the anonymous native people they visit on a riverboat outing. The fish out of water bring their own tanks.
Watching people departing on a ship is a common spur to the imagination of escaping the mundane. Turning the telescope the other way gives a different perspective. We get a surprise early on how someone as well-grounded as Helen can be disturbed with dark thoughts from her experience of departure:
The people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England. Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a very small island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned. …
There were the lights of the great theatres, the lights of the long streets, lights that indicated huge squares of domestic comfort, lights that hung high in air. No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze forever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.
But it doesn’t take long for her to get her sea legs. I love this window on how the mind can cohere itself in the face of the chaos in nature:
Choked by the wind their spirits rose with a rush, for on the skirts of all the grey tumult was a misty spot of gold. Instantly the world dropped into shape; they were no longer atoms flying in the void, but people riding a triumphant ship on the back of the sea. Wind and space were banished; the world floated like an apple in a tub, and the mind of man, which had been unmoored also, once more attached itself to the old beliefs.
At sea, it’s a challenge for the passengers to replicate the usual structures of class hierarchy, gender roles, and propriety. Yet they do succeed quite well at that. Women hang out with women discussing womanly concerns, and men jockey for respect on their triumphs at the reins of empire and quest for knowledge. A side trip to a Mediterranean port to give a ride to the Dalloways makes a lot of ripples. It was great to experience a prequel to these main characters for Woolf’s “Mrs.Dalloway.” Richard, a Minister of Parliament, seems otherworldly and inaccessible as a proper Edwardian. Rachel tries to draw him out on his wisdom and ends up the victim of a sudden kiss. It almost comic how the heroic master of human achievement can be so bumbling in his untamed lust. Clarissa I love as I did in her later rendition, so charming, empathetic, and self-deprecating. So bold to reach for some surprising and profound insight about human nature.
Life is a bit duller when we leave the Dalloways ashore and head out across the Atlantic. The search by Rachel and another passenger for a marriage prospect among the slim pickings aboard take center stage. Rachel at 24 is amazingly naïve about sexuality. Her main emotional outlet is through her music and she has severe challenges to formulating her feelings or discerning that of the inarticulate single men on the trip:
It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.
Helen is not really capable in mentoring Rachel on her quest for a husband as she has a rather jaded perspective:
When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness.
One of Rachel’s suitors, the scholarly Hirst is trying to write a proof of the existence of God. Fortunately for Rachel he proves a mental buffoon in his outlook about God’s creations:
“Oh, but we’re all agreed by this time that nature’s a mistake. She’s either very ugly, appallingly uncomfortable, or absolutely terrifying. I don’t know what alarms me most—a cow or a tree. I once met a cow in a field by night. The creature looked at me. I assure you it turned my hair grey. It’s a disgrace that the animals should be allowed to go at large.”
Terence Hewet is more promising as a sensitive soul and something of a poet and philosopher. But we almost want to warn Rachel away when he espouses typical views of the day about the capabilities of women:
The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women, have for men,” he went on. “I believe we must have the sort of power over you that we’re said to have over horses. They see us three times as big as we are or they’d never obey us. For that very reason, I’m inclined to doubt that you’ll ever do anything even when you have the vote.”
In private he writes:
Not really vainer than men. Lack of self-confidence at the base of most serious faults. Dislike of own sex traditional, or founded on fact? Every woman not so much a rake at heart, as an optimist, because they don’t think. …Again, it’s the fashion now to say that women are more practical and less idealistic than men, also that they have considerable organizing ability but no sense of honour.
But I felt hope for the ability of Rachel to expand his imagination and alter his perspective:
“Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed entirely of vast blocks of matter, and that we’re nothing but patches of light—“ she looked at the soft spots of sun wavering over the carpet and up the wall—“like that?”
This is no romantic novel from Austen or a repeat of Conrad’s moralistic journey toward the “Heart of Darkness”, but instead a substantial step toward Modernist experimentation already afoot by the likes of Joyce. Woolf makes her plot take a tragic turn and then diffuses and defuses its impact with a swarm of secondary characters taking up life as usual. The execution of closure to her tale was baffling and dissatisfying to me, but overall I felt the promise of her future capability to expose the mind in action and elucidate the meanings of gender in the modern world..
December 3, 2012
I wrote a review of The Voyage Out in July, 2012 after I read it. I deleted it because I lash out ("Stupid, stupid, stupid!") at myself. It's just a book review, Mars. I don't know how to use semi colons. I recognize them no more than I would see the brush strokes on a painting. The Virginia Woolf reviews on this site are more than a little intimidating. It isn't just because of the semi-colons but I gotta admit that I feel like Laura in The Glass Menagerie when she arrives to school late and cannot bear the paranoia that the sound of her limp is the elephant in the room. I won't fit. I get tongue-tied and self berate-y. I don't know if I am riding the same symphony as other Woolf readers because I cannot appreciate the whole perfect sentence thing. There's a world on the surface that I cannot mirror. At least I think I got the ripples. It's not a perfect book, it's kid of a weird duckling of awkward sidesteps and toe stepping dance moves. I can feel weird like that too. Being around people is definitely pretty weird to me. I'm going to be a pain in the ass and post a fourth review tonight to exercise my own communication demons. The Voyage Out is going down like the titanic. It did mean something to me.
That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church service had done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done; and if they didn't feel a thing why did they go and pretend to?
I think if people don't know each other it is because they don't want to know anyone else. The impossibility of connecting as a missing piece when you find out that someone has felt what you have felt. Standing in church and thinking about someone dying for your sins. Your expressions repeated on your mother, your sister, your children. This could be you, or it could not be. Is there any feeling that you could have that no one else in the world is capable of feeling? Maybe not all of it but isn't enough to want to understand? Why do I still feel so lonely? I can't feel it for (with) them.
Twenty four year-old Rachel is taken with her Aunt on their vacation on a whim to save her from more social weirdness ignored on her father's ship, or was it to save her Aunt from the fear of boredom. I don't remember now where exactly but it was somewhere in South America. My mind in conjuring up Tin Tin comics now, sorry. (Towns fevered. Trapped. Peeping toms in hotel windows and on and off animals and filling the day with planning the future.)
Clarissa from Mrs. Dalloway appears on the first part of the journey. Clarissa depressed the ever loving fuck out of me, as did Rachel's aunt and Mr. Dalloway (Richard) himself. They are the sort of people who are airy fairy and know all of the right things to say. I don't think I have had the right thing to say in my life. What is the point in moving through a script, with places to stand and cues to take? I disliked the feeling of winning and losing intensely. It was a strange feeling from Woolf that this was both a good and bad thing. It was in the sly smile that noticed what they were thinking. It wrote what they were thinking, on puppet strings. It was what they were doing, on a hand. I didn't like the over thinking, actually. Everyone was script writing their lives with their thinking about every move to make, every breath to take. I remember Rachel being surprised in her music room, home in her reveries and papers. I liked Rachel the best when she is surprised. I liked Clarissa best (and was the most saddened by her) when she could be surprised. She does not, after all, know exactly what her husband is thinking as she believes she does (he was putting the moves on young Rachel who flattered him with her very real interest in his forgotten childhood). It's forgiving when something else could happen. The surprise. It's annoying when Rachel's aunt Mrs. Ambrose (Evelyn) has her precise place in every company she might find herself in. I found that hard to take. I wanted to feel her feeling it hard to take, that she might be wrong, that someone may surprise before I felt like jumping over the ship. Almost, but too much thinking.
The passage I quoted above is what I've been mulling over about book all of this time. It is why I think that the people in Woolf's novel don't want to know anyone else. How do they suppose the know what someone else is thinking? Why shy away from her own religious belief that had been needed before because she didn't like the look on another's face? Rachel turned onto other's the expected to see social constraints that others had placed on her. Her own not knowing what the right thing to say.
It is magical when Rachel and her young lover feel the joy of shared interest in each other's universal I like long walks on the beach and skipped stones and Today I Was Born...
To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven about the roots of the world- the idea was incoherently delightful. She sprang up, and began moving about the room, bending and thrusting aside the chairs an tables as if she were indeed striking through the waters. He watched her with pleasure; she seemed to be cleaving a passage for herself, and dealing triumphantly with the obstacles which would hinder their passage through life.
They only had to ask, to have faith. Faith not hinged on how you think it should look like. I wish I had faith in people that lasted all of the time. I believe that Woolf felt it was possible for them if only they wanted to ask for it. It is when they allow themselves to be surprised and are happy about it. I think it was her first novel and I am not complaining so much as wishing. I also would compare it to some of my least favorite Elizabeth Bowen novels (not my favorite of all favorites The Death of the Heart that changed my life like when you have someone who understands you and you also have faith in it). It is smart, it lives in the world... Where's the faith?
What she thinking about, then? Evelyn was tormented by the little spark of life in her which was always trying to work through to other people, and was always being rebuffed. Falling silent she looked at her visitor, her shoes, her stockings, the combs in her hair, all the details of her dress in short, as though by seizing every detail she might get closer to the life within.
That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt, or could ever feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a single second that they were capable of feeling it, appalled her much as the church service had done, much as the face of the hospital nurse had done; and if they didn't feel a thing why did they go and pretend to?
I think if people don't know each other it is because they don't want to know anyone else. The impossibility of connecting as a missing piece when you find out that someone has felt what you have felt. Standing in church and thinking about someone dying for your sins. Your expressions repeated on your mother, your sister, your children. This could be you, or it could not be. Is there any feeling that you could have that no one else in the world is capable of feeling? Maybe not all of it but isn't enough to want to understand? Why do I still feel so lonely? I can't feel it for (with) them.
Twenty four year-old Rachel is taken with her Aunt on their vacation on a whim to save her from more social weirdness ignored on her father's ship, or was it to save her Aunt from the fear of boredom. I don't remember now where exactly but it was somewhere in South America. My mind in conjuring up Tin Tin comics now, sorry. (Towns fevered. Trapped. Peeping toms in hotel windows and on and off animals and filling the day with planning the future.)
Clarissa from Mrs. Dalloway appears on the first part of the journey. Clarissa depressed the ever loving fuck out of me, as did Rachel's aunt and Mr. Dalloway (Richard) himself. They are the sort of people who are airy fairy and know all of the right things to say. I don't think I have had the right thing to say in my life. What is the point in moving through a script, with places to stand and cues to take? I disliked the feeling of winning and losing intensely. It was a strange feeling from Woolf that this was both a good and bad thing. It was in the sly smile that noticed what they were thinking. It wrote what they were thinking, on puppet strings. It was what they were doing, on a hand. I didn't like the over thinking, actually. Everyone was script writing their lives with their thinking about every move to make, every breath to take. I remember Rachel being surprised in her music room, home in her reveries and papers. I liked Rachel the best when she is surprised. I liked Clarissa best (and was the most saddened by her) when she could be surprised. She does not, after all, know exactly what her husband is thinking as she believes she does (he was putting the moves on young Rachel who flattered him with her very real interest in his forgotten childhood). It's forgiving when something else could happen. The surprise. It's annoying when Rachel's aunt Mrs. Ambrose (Evelyn) has her precise place in every company she might find herself in. I found that hard to take. I wanted to feel her feeling it hard to take, that she might be wrong, that someone may surprise before I felt like jumping over the ship. Almost, but too much thinking.
The passage I quoted above is what I've been mulling over about book all of this time. It is why I think that the people in Woolf's novel don't want to know anyone else. How do they suppose the know what someone else is thinking? Why shy away from her own religious belief that had been needed before because she didn't like the look on another's face? Rachel turned onto other's the expected to see social constraints that others had placed on her. Her own not knowing what the right thing to say.
It is magical when Rachel and her young lover feel the joy of shared interest in each other's universal I like long walks on the beach and skipped stones and Today I Was Born...
To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and driven about the roots of the world- the idea was incoherently delightful. She sprang up, and began moving about the room, bending and thrusting aside the chairs an tables as if she were indeed striking through the waters. He watched her with pleasure; she seemed to be cleaving a passage for herself, and dealing triumphantly with the obstacles which would hinder their passage through life.
They only had to ask, to have faith. Faith not hinged on how you think it should look like. I wish I had faith in people that lasted all of the time. I believe that Woolf felt it was possible for them if only they wanted to ask for it. It is when they allow themselves to be surprised and are happy about it. I think it was her first novel and I am not complaining so much as wishing. I also would compare it to some of my least favorite Elizabeth Bowen novels (not my favorite of all favorites The Death of the Heart that changed my life like when you have someone who understands you and you also have faith in it). It is smart, it lives in the world... Where's the faith?
What she thinking about, then? Evelyn was tormented by the little spark of life in her which was always trying to work through to other people, and was always being rebuffed. Falling silent she looked at her visitor, her shoes, her stockings, the combs in her hair, all the details of her dress in short, as though by seizing every detail she might get closer to the life within.
May 24, 2021
I discovered Virginia Woolf rather late in my reading life, in my mid 40s. The first three novels of hers I read were Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves - all absolutely magnificent, and based simply on those three novels I would have no hesitation rankings Woolf as the greatest British novelist. Orlando, which I read next, was not quite at the same level but still wonderful.
So I must admit, judged by her own incredibly high bar, to finding her debut novel, The Voyage Out, a relative disappointment.
Much of my love for Woolf is how, in her later works, she fundamentally reshaped the novel from the Victorian and Edwardian form, whereas, to first order at least, The Voyage Out is a more conventional novel of manners, one that doesn't, initially at least, appear a significant advance on Jane Austen's (admittedly highly ground breaking) work 100 years earlier.
Some of Woolf's strengths in her more modernist novels, such as a lack of obsession with plot or setting, seem more like weaknesses here when the novel is judged on its own merits rather than as Woolf searching for a form. I didn't particularly believe To The Lighthouse was set in the Hebrides rather than St Ives (with which Woolf was familiar) but it didn't matter, whereas the rather unconvincing "Santa Monica" in this book seems more glaring. Similarly the rather narrow, priviliged settings of Woolf's later novels didn't impact my appreciation of her literary innovation, whereas here it did.
The theory that Woolf had originally planned a much more politically radical novel, before being dissuaded by her friends (a novel which Louise DeSalvo attempted to reconstruct from Woolf's papers and published under the original title Melymbrosia) may also explain the rather conventional nature of some of the subject matter.
That said the lyricism of the prose is a clear pointer to what is to come, the lack of a happy conclusion is welcome (certainly no "Reader, I married him" here) and the novel has some interesting things to say about being a woman in a masculine era (the vote had yet to be granted to women) and the role of politicians versus artists.
But 3 stars and not where I would recommend starting with Woolf.
So I must admit, judged by her own incredibly high bar, to finding her debut novel, The Voyage Out, a relative disappointment.
Much of my love for Woolf is how, in her later works, she fundamentally reshaped the novel from the Victorian and Edwardian form, whereas, to first order at least, The Voyage Out is a more conventional novel of manners, one that doesn't, initially at least, appear a significant advance on Jane Austen's (admittedly highly ground breaking) work 100 years earlier.
Some of Woolf's strengths in her more modernist novels, such as a lack of obsession with plot or setting, seem more like weaknesses here when the novel is judged on its own merits rather than as Woolf searching for a form. I didn't particularly believe To The Lighthouse was set in the Hebrides rather than St Ives (with which Woolf was familiar) but it didn't matter, whereas the rather unconvincing "Santa Monica" in this book seems more glaring. Similarly the rather narrow, priviliged settings of Woolf's later novels didn't impact my appreciation of her literary innovation, whereas here it did.
The theory that Woolf had originally planned a much more politically radical novel, before being dissuaded by her friends (a novel which Louise DeSalvo attempted to reconstruct from Woolf's papers and published under the original title Melymbrosia) may also explain the rather conventional nature of some of the subject matter.
That said the lyricism of the prose is a clear pointer to what is to come, the lack of a happy conclusion is welcome (certainly no "Reader, I married him" here) and the novel has some interesting things to say about being a woman in a masculine era (the vote had yet to be granted to women) and the role of politicians versus artists.
But 3 stars and not where I would recommend starting with Woolf.
May 21, 2018
What an incredible first novel! A young woman tells the story of how people view life events differently in different times of their lives. The young view things one way, the more senior another; men view things differently than women. It is a wonderful look at the world in a microcosm of people.
At the same time, is the story of Rachel's maturing and coming into herself. She grows from a naive, unthinking girl into a wiser, self-thinking young woman. She is at least starting to think for herself.
Life in the South American resort is superficial. This is portrayed by the activities of the characters and the constant sun, warmth and unvarying days.
Yet Life continues, always continues. In the end, Life continues.
This is a remarkable first novel. Virginia Woolf covers so much about love, marriage and relationships, in many age groups. She attacks the social expectations of men & women's roles in society and the limitations upon women. For such a young author, this book covers a wide variety of insights through many ages.
At the same time, is the story of Rachel's maturing and coming into herself. She grows from a naive, unthinking girl into a wiser, self-thinking young woman. She is at least starting to think for herself.
Life in the South American resort is superficial. This is portrayed by the activities of the characters and the constant sun, warmth and unvarying days.
Yet Life continues, always continues. In the end, Life continues.
This is a remarkable first novel. Virginia Woolf covers so much about love, marriage and relationships, in many age groups. She attacks the social expectations of men & women's roles in society and the limitations upon women. For such a young author, this book covers a wide variety of insights through many ages.
February 23, 2014
22 February, 2014
Mr. H. Melville, Esq.
c/o The Spouter Inn, New Bedford, MA
My Dear Melville,
I pray this letter finds you well, as, you no doubt noticed, I could not do so in person. Do accept my apologies; since our whaling voyage two years ago it has been my fondest wish to journey with you again, and, indeed, it was my intention to visit you at the beginning of this year; but, alas, I have been detained by Mrs. Woolf. Damn that woman, she is too good! I did not mean to tarry long with her, but she invited me to a party with her friend Mrs. Dalloway, and since that night I have been reluctant to part company with her. We just got back from an ocean voyage to South America (not one of your ocean voyages, I swear!), and she has promised to regale me with more stories soon. How can I tear myself away?
Please, my good friend, do not be cross. I shall join you again in a few short months, once my visit with Mrs. Woolf has ended. She has even said that we might visit a lighthouse later! Out of respect for our friendship, I promise not to approach it by sea.
Wait for me, Herman, and accept my solemn promise that you will soon be reunited with
Your faithful friend,
Jacob
P.S. All my love to Queequeg, etc.
Mr. H. Melville, Esq.
c/o The Spouter Inn, New Bedford, MA
My Dear Melville,
I pray this letter finds you well, as, you no doubt noticed, I could not do so in person. Do accept my apologies; since our whaling voyage two years ago it has been my fondest wish to journey with you again, and, indeed, it was my intention to visit you at the beginning of this year; but, alas, I have been detained by Mrs. Woolf. Damn that woman, she is too good! I did not mean to tarry long with her, but she invited me to a party with her friend Mrs. Dalloway, and since that night I have been reluctant to part company with her. We just got back from an ocean voyage to South America (not one of your ocean voyages, I swear!), and she has promised to regale me with more stories soon. How can I tear myself away?
Please, my good friend, do not be cross. I shall join you again in a few short months, once my visit with Mrs. Woolf has ended. She has even said that we might visit a lighthouse later! Out of respect for our friendship, I promise not to approach it by sea.
Wait for me, Herman, and accept my solemn promise that you will soon be reunited with
Your faithful friend,
Jacob
P.S. All my love to Queequeg, etc.
February 3, 2017
I live near Charleston, Vanessa Bell’s old house. Often when friends visit me I take them there for the afternoon. Therefore I always feel a bit embarrassed when I have to admit I’ve never read Virginia Woolf. So I’ve finally rectified that.
My first impression was that this is much easier to read than I expected. There isn’t much that’s modern about it. But then it was her first novel and no doubt she was still testing her powers. It’s essentially about a group of perhaps overly sophisticated individuals who embark on a voyage to a much less sophisticated part of the world and the discoveries and conflicts such a voyage bodies forth. I found it a little slow to begin with but by the half way point was hooked. The writing is beautiful, especially when Rachel, the young heroine, is at the helm. A small detail I really liked was that the young lovers were constantly referred to as ordinary looking. Proof we don’t need uncommonly beautiful people to keep us fully engaged in a story of young love.
I’m going to give Mrs Dalloway a go next.
My first impression was that this is much easier to read than I expected. There isn’t much that’s modern about it. But then it was her first novel and no doubt she was still testing her powers. It’s essentially about a group of perhaps overly sophisticated individuals who embark on a voyage to a much less sophisticated part of the world and the discoveries and conflicts such a voyage bodies forth. I found it a little slow to begin with but by the half way point was hooked. The writing is beautiful, especially when Rachel, the young heroine, is at the helm. A small detail I really liked was that the young lovers were constantly referred to as ordinary looking. Proof we don’t need uncommonly beautiful people to keep us fully engaged in a story of young love.
I’m going to give Mrs Dalloway a go next.
October 18, 2025
Flawless. Another fine feather for her cap. A must read for Woolf fans!
February 11, 2024
It took Virginia Woolf seven years to write 'The Voyage Out '. Time well spent On her first novel. This is not one of her experimental novels but it does discuss the inner thoughts of the characters. Their day to day existence is a pleasure to read. Helen Ambrose as the aunt takes her niece Rachel under her wing at her villa in South America. Rachel has lead a sheltered life in Victorian England. In the tropical land she visits she falls in love with Terence.
The description of the voyage out, the dance and the journey up the river into the jungle to visit a native village are all woven into the plot. The English circle at the hotel with their habits and complacency upset Rachel in their lack of feeling and emotion.
Men have their place and women are entering a new age. Woolf captures women’s dissatisfaction and desire for more independence and Woolf in the early 1900s well.
The description of the voyage out, the dance and the journey up the river into the jungle to visit a native village are all woven into the plot. The English circle at the hotel with their habits and complacency upset Rachel in their lack of feeling and emotion.
Men have their place and women are entering a new age. Woolf captures women’s dissatisfaction and desire for more independence and Woolf in the early 1900s well.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 27, 2019
…other people whose identity was so little developed that the Ambroses did not discover that they possessed names. This quote from the book states my main problem with the book, even though the characters I’m thinking of do have names. Also, there are too many of them. Even the Dalloways make a brief, though memorable, appearance; and except for Mr. Dalloway’s one effect on Rachel, the main character (at least I think she is; she’s the only one that changes), I’m not sure what the Dalloways are doing here. However, they are vibrant and alive, especially Mrs. Dalloway, so it’s a boon for us that Woolf decided to use her again, and more fully.
Speaking of Rachel, her father is a character that is developed and then dropped, though we expect to see him by the end. By the end of the novel’s climactic scene, all I kept wondering is: Where is Mr. Vinrace!?!
It’s messy (first-time novelists sometimes feel they have to put 'everything' in their first novel) but still worth reading for its prose and ideas. In fact, the best thing about it is that some of the beautifully written, psychologically perceptive, forward-thinking scenes foreshadow what will come later for Woolf.
Speaking of Rachel, her father is a character that is developed and then dropped, though we expect to see him by the end. By the end of the novel’s climactic scene, all I kept wondering is: Where is Mr. Vinrace!?!
It’s messy (first-time novelists sometimes feel they have to put 'everything' in their first novel) but still worth reading for its prose and ideas. In fact, the best thing about it is that some of the beautifully written, psychologically perceptive, forward-thinking scenes foreshadow what will come later for Woolf.
August 21, 2022
Почему роман заканчивается не смертью главной героини Рэчел, как это было бы в традиционном романе, а ещё две главы проходят после ее смерти? Рэчел отнюдь не главная героиня, она одна из. Главными героями являются англичане в путешествии в Южную Америку, которая изображена столь невнятно, что казалось, что действие происходит в Англии. Писательница показывает их реакцию на смерть - большинство осталось совершенно равнодушно. Самое большое отвращение вызывает Теренс, который во время долгой агонии невесты испытывал одно желание, чтобы поскорее все кончилось, он настолько отчужден и индифферентен к своей возлюбленной, что буквально призывает смерть.
Вирджиния Вульф при написании романа ставила две задачи - привлечь внимание к избирательному праву женщин в Великобритании и вопрос образования женщин, в том числе полового, вопрос порывания с викторианским ханжеством. Так, Рэчел Винрэс, будучи уже взрослой девушкой не имеет представления, откуда берутся дети. И это считалось хорошим воспитанием. Любопытно, что в этом романе уже появляется чета Дэллоуэй, изображённая узколобыми, чванливыми и ограниченными.
Вирджиния Вульф при написании романа ставила две задачи - привлечь внимание к избирательному праву женщин в Великобритании и вопрос образования женщин, в том числе полового, вопрос порывания с викторианским ханжеством. Так, Рэчел Винрэс, будучи уже взрослой девушкой не имеет представления, откуда берутся дети. И это считалось хорошим воспитанием. Любопытно, что в этом романе уже появляется чета Дэллоуэй, изображённая узколобыми, чванливыми и ограниченными.
August 14, 2020
The waves beat on the shore far away, and the soft wind passed through the branches of the trees, seeming to encircle him with peace and security, with dark and nothingness. Surely the world of strife and fret and anxiety was not the real world, but this was the real world, the world that lay beneath the superficial world, so that, whatever happened, one was secure. The quiet and peace seemed to lap his body in a fine cool sheet, soothing every nerve; his mind seemed once more to expand, and become natural.
But when he had stood thus for a time a noise in the house roused him; he turned instinctively and went into the drawing-room. The sight of the lamp-lit room brought back so abruptly all that he had forgotten that he stood for a moment unable to move. He remembered everything, the hour, the minute even, what point they had reached, and what was to come. He cursed himself for making believe for a minute that things were different from what they are. The night was now harder to face than ever.
But when he had stood thus for a time a noise in the house roused him; he turned instinctively and went into the drawing-room. The sight of the lamp-lit room brought back so abruptly all that he had forgotten that he stood for a moment unable to move. He remembered everything, the hour, the minute even, what point they had reached, and what was to come. He cursed himself for making believe for a minute that things were different from what they are. The night was now harder to face than ever.
September 30, 2015
I personally consider Virginia Woolf the greatest writer of the 20th century, period, bar none, man or woman, doesn't matter. But I'm not a writer myself so I don't have the ability, I can't find the words to express what I feel about what I've read. Many of you can and do write beautiful reviews worthy of the books they honor. Many times I've said, "that's how I feel, that's what I think". Oh well.
Having said that, this book is not one of her best. It's not bad, it's very good actually, it just not at that very high level that she would reach with more experience. This was her first novel I believe and has a different feel to it from her other works. But the genius is in there, you can feel it.
Having said that, this book is not one of her best. It's not bad, it's very good actually, it just not at that very high level that she would reach with more experience. This was her first novel I believe and has a different feel to it from her other works. But the genius is in there, you can feel it.
June 26, 2019
Just perfect! Love it!
March 13, 2010
Freaking fantastic.
Rachel Vinrace is a naive and vulnerable 24-year-old young woman on a sea voyage from London to a South American resort with her aunt and uncle. Having been sheltered the first 24 years of her life, Rachel is exceptionally shy and startled when meeting new people on the ship, particularly when they show genuine interest in her as a person and as an intellectual. The relationships she forms with these people affect her greatly, and she even falls in love. This isn't just a book about a sea voyage; the voyage here is a girl growing into her own woman, emotionally and intellectually. She comes alive before the reader's eyes in a surprisingly non-saccharine manner.
The back cover of the edition I read mentions the book being "full of light and shadow", and no truer words have been written. This is Woolf's first novel, written after at least one of her own suicide attempts, and it's clear on every page how light and dark, land and sea affect each character, each scene, each motive. One would think after a while the motif would get dull, but I found myself excited by it each time.
The stream-of-consciousness in this book is delicious, and not annoying as can happen so often in modernist writing. If all Woolf books could be like this one, I'd be a happy camper. Alas, I think this is the minority and I lucked out. I will certainly try at least Mrs. Dalloway since Clarissa Dalloway makes her debut in The Voyage Out. I'm interested to see where her story goes.
Rachel Vinrace is a naive and vulnerable 24-year-old young woman on a sea voyage from London to a South American resort with her aunt and uncle. Having been sheltered the first 24 years of her life, Rachel is exceptionally shy and startled when meeting new people on the ship, particularly when they show genuine interest in her as a person and as an intellectual. The relationships she forms with these people affect her greatly, and she even falls in love. This isn't just a book about a sea voyage; the voyage here is a girl growing into her own woman, emotionally and intellectually. She comes alive before the reader's eyes in a surprisingly non-saccharine manner.
The back cover of the edition I read mentions the book being "full of light and shadow", and no truer words have been written. This is Woolf's first novel, written after at least one of her own suicide attempts, and it's clear on every page how light and dark, land and sea affect each character, each scene, each motive. One would think after a while the motif would get dull, but I found myself excited by it each time.
...here the view was one of infinite sun-dried earth, earth pointed in pinnacles, heaped in vast barriers, earth widening and spreading away and away like the immense floor of the sea, earth chequered by day and by night, and partitioned into different lands, where famous cities were founded, and the races of men changed from dark savages to white civilized men, and back to dark savages again.
The stream-of-consciousness in this book is delicious, and not annoying as can happen so often in modernist writing. If all Woolf books could be like this one, I'd be a happy camper. Alas, I think this is the minority and I lucked out. I will certainly try at least Mrs. Dalloway since Clarissa Dalloway makes her debut in The Voyage Out. I'm interested to see where her story goes.
August 21, 2023
Хронологически това е май първият издаден роман на В. Улф. Впечатленията ми набързо са, че Улф е по-силна в модернистичното, новаторството и добре, че се е ориентирала натам иначе едва ли днес името й щеше да се помни с романи като "Далечно плаване". За сравнение "Към фара" и "Мисис Далауей" са много по-добри от Далечно плаване.
Това, което в "Далечно плаване" обаче ми хареса, е разказването на драмите на героите. Хареса ми как историята вплита няколко различни контекста, следвайки традиционния сюжет на литературата в Англия. Присъстваше дискусията за равенството между половете, женската гледна точка (или по-скоро отсъствието й) и експлоатирането на мъжката гледна точка в изкуството, политиката, обществения живот като цяло. Не ми харесаха някои грапавини, които нарушаваха баланса между гледната точка на героите и на разказвача. Чувството за хумор на Улф, например, ми стоеше просташко, извън образа на героите, и беше много по-грубо от деликатната ирония, която се наблюдава в по-късните й твроби.
Романтичната нишка в сюжета през цялото време беше държана в конкуренция с вървящи дискусии за политика, история, полове, права на жените. Това ми направи добро впечатление и краят, съчетаващ всички тези елементи, беше задоволителен. Романът си струва да се прочете с цел опознаване на Улф като творец, защото сюжетът макар че бе традиционен, съдържаше моменти на вътрешни съзерцания, които се превръщат в основен модел на разказване в късните й творби.
Това, което в "Далечно плаване" обаче ми хареса, е разказването на драмите на героите. Хареса ми как историята вплита няколко различни контекста, следвайки традиционния сюжет на литературата в Англия. Присъстваше дискусията за равенството между половете, женската гледна точка (или по-скоро отсъствието й) и експлоатирането на мъжката гледна точка в изкуството, политиката, обществения живот като цяло. Не ми харесаха някои грапавини, които нарушаваха баланса между гледната точка на героите и на разказвача. Чувството за хумор на Улф, например, ми стоеше просташко, извън образа на героите, и беше много по-грубо от деликатната ирония, която се наблюдава в по-късните й твроби.
Романтичната нишка в сюжета през цялото време беше държана в конкуренция с вървящи дискусии за политика, история, полове, права на жените. Това ми направи добро впечатление и краят, съчетаващ всички тези елементи, беше задоволителен. Романът си струва да се прочете с цел опознаване на Улф като творец, защото сюжетът макар че бе традиционен, съдържаше моменти на вътрешни съзерцания, които се превръщат в основен модел на разказване в късните й творби.
March 23, 2018
Le Onde
È definito “la storia di un rito di passaggio” questo primo romanzo di Virginia Woolf, così come “un viaggio iniziatico” quello che Rachel compie in compagnia degli zii, i coniugi Ambrose, del padre, comandante della nave cargo che solca l’oceano diretta in Sudamerica, e di un piccolo gruppo di passeggeri inglesi fra i quali, sorprendentemente, fanno una fugace e intensa apparizione Clarissa e Richard Dalloway, che compaiono per lo spazio della traversata lasciando quella scia luminosa che molti anni dopo condurrà Virginia alla festa di compleanno di Mrs. Dalloway.
Un viaggio iniziatico, dunque, un Bildungsroman, che in realtà, come spiega la bella e inopportuna introduzione (inopportuna perché comprensiva di spoiler, e non finirò mai di chiedermi perché non le mettano alla fine, visto che sono del tutto inutili nel parlare e dettagliare di cose che non si sono ancora lette) sono due: la crociera cui fa riferimento il titolo (“The Voyage out”, “Melymbrosia” in origine, prima delle n-o-v-e stesure - e quasi nove anni di gestazione, in mezzo ai quali anche un tentativo di suicidio - che verrà pubblicato nel 1981 sulla base degli appunti di Virginia Woolf dalla studiosa Louise DeSalvo - che contenevano degli originali commenti politici su questioni come l'omosessualità, il suffragio femminile, e il colonialismo, ma che a causa dell’epoca e della giovane età dell’autrice - che poteva vederne compromettere la carriera a venire - furono modificati nella versione finale), quella che conduce nave e passeggeri dal porto di Londra fino in America Latina nell’isola immaginaria di Santa Marina, dove si recano per trascorrere un periodo di vacanza, di esplorazione, di auto esaltazione per la presa di contatto con i possedimenti coloniali britannici.
La crociera, dunque, che solca gli oceani e attraversa i continenti, ma anche la breve crociera che i protagonisti del romanzo compiono all’interno dello stesso dal luogo turistico dove alloggiano (chi in albergo, chi in abitazione privata - e anche questa distinzione è importantissima nell’evoluzione della storia) verso l’interno: in cerca di emozioni, in cerca di civiltà remote, in cerca dell’origine del mondo civile.
E infine, il terzo viaggio, quello che Rachel Vinrace, ventiquattrenne ingenua, ancora intellettualmente e sentimentalmente acerba, compie verso se stessa e la consapevolezza di sé e del mondo.
Se la scrittura di Virginia Woolf, ventiquattrenne anche lei alla prima stesura dell’opera, è ancora lontana dalla maturità, sono già presenti, invece, non solo i temi ricorrenti nella sua letteratura (la condizione femminile e il suo ruolo nella società, la politica, la morte, l’amore, la critica letteraria, l’Arte e il suo ruolo), ma anche i primi tentativi di sottrarre la sua scrittura alle briglie imposte dai canoni del romanzo ottocentesco; le vibrazioni della sua poetica, i pensieri che guizzano nella mente dei protagonisti, lo scrutarsi degli uomini e delle donne in cerca di un punto di contatto, l’impressionismo dato dal mostrarsi della Natura attraverso onde emotive dove la sua bellezza e la sua crudeltà si propagano e rivelano attraverso l’uso delle parole, lasciano già intuire e intravedere la cifra stilistica della Virginia Woolf che verrà.
Rachel, in tal senso, non ne è la rappresentazione né la controfigura - la sua ingenuità intellettuale e la sua superficialità emotiva e sentimentale sono troppo lontane da quelle dell’autrice - ma è la voce attraverso la quale veicolare le sue idee libere, attraverso la quale mostrare al lettore l’indipendenza e l’audacia dei suo pensieri e della sua crescita interiore.
Il venticinquesimo capitolo su tutti, laddove tutto si compie e si determina, meriterebbe da solo la lettura di quest’opera e un intero firmamento di stelle.
Avevo un certo timore nell’affrontare nuovamente la lettura di un romanzo di Virginia Woolf (in questo senso le due precedenti letture - Gita al faro e quella parziale de Le onde - non mi avevano aiutata), ma amando moltissimo tutto ciò che di privato ha scritto e da me letto in passato (i diari, le lettere di viaggio, i saggi, le critiche letterarie), non potevo rinunciare; ed è per questo che a partire dai suoi primissimi racconti, ho deciso già da tempo di leggere tutto quello che riguarda la narrativa in ordine cronologico: prossimo appuntamento, dunque, confortata da questa lettura, con Notte e giorno.
È definito “la storia di un rito di passaggio” questo primo romanzo di Virginia Woolf, così come “un viaggio iniziatico” quello che Rachel compie in compagnia degli zii, i coniugi Ambrose, del padre, comandante della nave cargo che solca l’oceano diretta in Sudamerica, e di un piccolo gruppo di passeggeri inglesi fra i quali, sorprendentemente, fanno una fugace e intensa apparizione Clarissa e Richard Dalloway, che compaiono per lo spazio della traversata lasciando quella scia luminosa che molti anni dopo condurrà Virginia alla festa di compleanno di Mrs. Dalloway.
Un viaggio iniziatico, dunque, un Bildungsroman, che in realtà, come spiega la bella e inopportuna introduzione (inopportuna perché comprensiva di spoiler, e non finirò mai di chiedermi perché non le mettano alla fine, visto che sono del tutto inutili nel parlare e dettagliare di cose che non si sono ancora lette) sono due: la crociera cui fa riferimento il titolo (“The Voyage out”, “Melymbrosia” in origine, prima delle n-o-v-e stesure - e quasi nove anni di gestazione, in mezzo ai quali anche un tentativo di suicidio - che verrà pubblicato nel 1981 sulla base degli appunti di Virginia Woolf dalla studiosa Louise DeSalvo - che contenevano degli originali commenti politici su questioni come l'omosessualità, il suffragio femminile, e il colonialismo, ma che a causa dell’epoca e della giovane età dell’autrice - che poteva vederne compromettere la carriera a venire - furono modificati nella versione finale), quella che conduce nave e passeggeri dal porto di Londra fino in America Latina nell’isola immaginaria di Santa Marina, dove si recano per trascorrere un periodo di vacanza, di esplorazione, di auto esaltazione per la presa di contatto con i possedimenti coloniali britannici.
La crociera, dunque, che solca gli oceani e attraversa i continenti, ma anche la breve crociera che i protagonisti del romanzo compiono all’interno dello stesso dal luogo turistico dove alloggiano (chi in albergo, chi in abitazione privata - e anche questa distinzione è importantissima nell’evoluzione della storia) verso l’interno: in cerca di emozioni, in cerca di civiltà remote, in cerca dell’origine del mondo civile.
E infine, il terzo viaggio, quello che Rachel Vinrace, ventiquattrenne ingenua, ancora intellettualmente e sentimentalmente acerba, compie verso se stessa e la consapevolezza di sé e del mondo.
Se la scrittura di Virginia Woolf, ventiquattrenne anche lei alla prima stesura dell’opera, è ancora lontana dalla maturità, sono già presenti, invece, non solo i temi ricorrenti nella sua letteratura (la condizione femminile e il suo ruolo nella società, la politica, la morte, l’amore, la critica letteraria, l’Arte e il suo ruolo), ma anche i primi tentativi di sottrarre la sua scrittura alle briglie imposte dai canoni del romanzo ottocentesco; le vibrazioni della sua poetica, i pensieri che guizzano nella mente dei protagonisti, lo scrutarsi degli uomini e delle donne in cerca di un punto di contatto, l’impressionismo dato dal mostrarsi della Natura attraverso onde emotive dove la sua bellezza e la sua crudeltà si propagano e rivelano attraverso l’uso delle parole, lasciano già intuire e intravedere la cifra stilistica della Virginia Woolf che verrà.
Rachel, in tal senso, non ne è la rappresentazione né la controfigura - la sua ingenuità intellettuale e la sua superficialità emotiva e sentimentale sono troppo lontane da quelle dell’autrice - ma è la voce attraverso la quale veicolare le sue idee libere, attraverso la quale mostrare al lettore l’indipendenza e l’audacia dei suo pensieri e della sua crescita interiore.
Il venticinquesimo capitolo su tutti, laddove tutto si compie e si determina, meriterebbe da solo la lettura di quest’opera e un intero firmamento di stelle.
Avevo un certo timore nell’affrontare nuovamente la lettura di un romanzo di Virginia Woolf (in questo senso le due precedenti letture - Gita al faro e quella parziale de Le onde - non mi avevano aiutata), ma amando moltissimo tutto ciò che di privato ha scritto e da me letto in passato (i diari, le lettere di viaggio, i saggi, le critiche letterarie), non potevo rinunciare; ed è per questo che a partire dai suoi primissimi racconti, ho deciso già da tempo di leggere tutto quello che riguarda la narrativa in ordine cronologico: prossimo appuntamento, dunque, confortata da questa lettura, con Notte e giorno.
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