The Voyage Out (Collins Classics)

Product Information

Chapter XIX. Evelyn complains to Rachel about two men with whom she is romantically involved. Then she becomes enthusiastic about social reform – including the rescue of prostitutes. Rachel feels oppressed by her appeal to intimacy. She then meets Mrs Allan who invites her to her room and asks her to help her get dressed for tea. Rachel feels oppressed by this appeal too, and escapes into the garden, but she is irritated by the chatter and the discussion of plans for the excursion, and she then quarrells with Helen. Helen, Ridley, and Rachel are at the resort only a short time before the two women become friends with several people staying in a hotel down the hill from the Ambroses’ villa; the two most important of these new friends are St. John Hirst, a scholar from Oxford, and his friend Terrence Hewet, an aspiring novelist. Hirst, who perceives most women as “objects,” finds unexpected pleasure in talking with Helen, though he finds Rachel annoyingly unthinking and unread. Hewet’s relationship with Rachel is based upon an intuitive and emotional, rather than intellectual, understanding, and he spends much time defending Hirst to her, assuaging the pain and anger she feels as a result of various insulting and condescending comments Hirst makes to her, and helping her to look at herself objectively and even laugh at herself. DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980. Discusses the novel’s inception, drafts, inspirations for characters and events, and themes. Detailed comparisons of drafts offer insight into Woolf’s creative process. An accessible source. The Modern Library is proud to include Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out–together with a new Introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham. Published to acclaim in England in 1915 and in America five years later, The Voyage Out marks Woolf’s beginning as one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and prolific writers.

The final work was over-edited; her publisher felt that her commentary on British politics was too pointed and that it could nip her career in the bud. I was delighted to be invited to join in the editing of this volume, together with Sarah M. Hall, Mary Ellen Foley and Lindsay Martin. The essays range from academic analysis of particular aspects of the text to the enthusiasm of the common reader. There are accounts of the writing of the book and how it was received in 1915, personal responses to the text as both readers and teachers, discussions on questions of censorship, classical and German influences, early signs of Woolf’s modernist style and hints of her relationship with the Argentinian writer Victoria Ocampo, to give just a flavour of this wide-ranging collection. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (London: University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 6. Eventually, the four of them, plus a couple staying at the villa next door, go on a little “expedition” to the nearby village. Rachel and Hewet take a stroll in the woods alone, leaving the rest of the group behind for a while. For the entirety of the novel, the two are very fond of each other, but neither is brave enough to tell the other. However, with them being completely alone with just the other for company in a wild place, they find it appropriate and even a touch thrilling to confess their feelings to each other. Hewet proposes and they are betrothed, planning to get married soon. However, when they get married and become very comfortable with each other, Rachel becomes very ill. Her condition proceeds to worsen. There is no good doctor in the area that they are in. Hewet doesn’t want to admit that Rachel is in a very bad situation, her condition becoming very dangerous. He argues with Helen, trying to convince himself that this isn’t as bad as it seems. However, Rachel soon starts to hallucinate and it becomes the last straw for Hewet. He runs to the neighboring area and retrieves a much more competent doctor. The doctor rushes to Rachel and is distraught when he discovers the severity of her condition. With anguish, he informs the group that there is nothing he can do for her. Hewet stays by her bedside as she peacefully dies in her sleep.Chapter X. Rachel is reading modern literature and reflecting philosophically about the nature of life. She and Helen receive an invitation to Hewet’s expedition. The outing presents the radical young figure of Evelyn Murgatroyd, and Helen meets Terence Hewet, One must, then, question Hermione Lee’s argument that childless, fussy Mrs Elliot, absent-minded Mrs Thornbury, bovine Susan Warrington and her tyrannical old aunt, and the would-be liberated flirt, Evelyn M., are callous caricatures. There is little warmth even in the treatment of the kind academic spinster, Miss Allan, or of the jolly eccentric Mrs Flushing. The tone for the presentation of the minor characters is feebly satirical. (Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (London: Methuen, 1977) p. 38) Indeed, it is difficult to see how we could know that Miss Allan is kind or Mrs Flushing jolly unless it is through Woolf’s sympathetic treatment of them. Jean Guiget’s description of the hotel visitors as ‘a set of grotesque and ungainly puppets’ is equally inappropriate (Jean Guiget, Virginia Woolf and her Works, trans. Jean Stewart (London: Hogarth Press, 1965) p. 202). To describe the novel’s minor characters in these terms is to make the mistake of accepting Rachel’s response to them as authoritative. Both David Daiches ( Virginia Woolf, p. 14) and Hermione Lee ( Virginia Woolf, p. 50) argue that Rachel’s death is not sufficiently anticipated in the novel. But Alice van Buren Kelley is right to argue that in The Voyage Out, ‘Once the visionary aspect of death is revealed with Rachel’s actual dying, all earlier hints of tragedy take on a deeper significance’ (Alice van Buren Kelley, The Novels of Virginia Woolf: Fact and Vision (London: University of Chicago Press, 1973) p. 12).

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:

Help

Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Metadata services officer Simon Cooper with Virginia Woolf’s copy of her first novel The Voyage Out. Photograph: Stefanie Zingsheim The Voyage Out is announced as the author’s first novel. That fact is the most hopeful thing about it. With the cleverness shown here, crude as most of it is, there should be a possibility of something worth while from the same pen in the future.

A young woman learns about life, and love found and lost, in this thought-provoking debut novel by one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and prolific writers—with an introduction by Elisa Gabbert, author of The Unreality of Memory Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs. Carolyn Heilbrun draws attention to Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that men have found in women more complicity than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed (Heilbrun, Towards Androgyny, p. xi). In a more recent book, Heilbrun notes that ‘public opinion polls show that a higher proportion of women than men oppose passage of the Equal Rights Amendment’ (Carolyn Heilbrun, Reinventing Womanhood (London: Victor Gollancz, 1979) p. 88). 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!

Change Website Language

Where Woolf seems boldest, however, and where we can see signs of the technical mastery that is to come, is in Woolf’s occasional use of free indirect style. Sometimes she uses this technique as a Flaubertian tool of irony, exposing the distance between her characters’ thoughts and her own, as when describing the Emma Bovary-like romantic dreams of Evelyn: “‘D’you think Garibaldi was ever up here?’ she asked Mr. Hirst. Oh, if she had been his bride! If, instead of a picnic party, this was a party of patriots, and she, red-shirted like the rest, had lain among grim men, flat on the turf, aiming her gun at the white turrets beneath them, screening her eyes to pierce through the smoke” (130). More complexly, Woolf sometimes uses free indirect style to render the voice of the community and its standards, what Roland Barthes called the reference code. Here, we see the recently engaged Susan thinking: “Marriage, marriage, that was the right thing, the only thing, the solution required by every one she knew…” (179). This is Woolf’s subtlest melding of different voices within the novel. Woolf writes in the authorial third person, but the words appear to be Susan’s. Perhaps more accurately, the words seem to be those of the community and culture from which Susan comes. We thus have the language of the community filtered through Susan filtered through Woolf. Franco Moretti describes Jane Austen’s use of free indirect style as “the composed, slightly resigned voice of the well-socialized individual,” a language “halfway between social doxa and the individual voice.” [5] Even at this early stage, Woolf was accomplishing this balancing act between the voice of the community and the voice of the character. Her intermingling of voices would only become bolder in her future writing. The Voyage Out was unlike anything else that had been published, and so critical reception was mixed. In E.M. Forester‘s review, he wrote: