Status Updates From The Voyage Out (Modern Clas...

this section covers the other part of the dance and its aftermath, with Hewet and Rachel obviously in the process of falling in love, and featuring a lovely romantic passage where Hewet returns the favor of the women spying on him, going to the Ambrose villa, and hearing and seeing Helen and Rachel talk, and while he is fond of Helen it is Rachel who he is focused on.

this span covers the two main young men of the piece, Hewet and Hirst, arranging first an expedition to the top of a local mountain for a picnic and then a dance to celebrate the engagement of two of the visiting English. I’m stoked to see how the self-styled intellectual young men perceive Helen and Rachel but Woolf is playing it naturally as they interact more with the hotel patrons they are familiar with.

... he had written twenty lines of his poem on God, and the awful thing was that he’d practically proved the fact that God did exist... and he went on to wonder what would happen if God did exist—‘an old gentleman in a beard and a long blue dressing-gown, extremely testy and disagreeable as he’s bound to be? Can you suggest a rhyme? God, rod, sod—all used; any others?

Currently taking a break from reading it 🤧

what’s beautiful here: Rachel, never having conversated with men before, is enthralled by Mr. Dalloway, and at one point he impulsively kisses her. Woolf’s description of Rachel’s feelings—so intense that they’re painful, trying to steady her nerves, thoroughly having enjoyed the kiss but still terrified at the universe of gender relations that has opened before her, and her aunt Helen shepherding her.