The Voyage Out

**A Voyage Toward Freedom Ends in a Modern Tragedy**

**Virginia Woolf's First Novel**

**Edwardian Society Meets the Edge of the Unknown**

**The Book That First Introduced Clarissa Dalloway**

*Before the celebrated masterpieces came The Voyage Out: a first book in which Virginia Woolf's defining concerns were already taking shape.*

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Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship and is launched on a course of self-discovery in a kind of modern mythical voyage. The mismatched jumble of passengers provides Woolf with an opportunity to satirise Edwardian life. The novel introduces Clarissa Dalloway, the central character of Woolf's later novel, Mrs Dalloway. Two of the other characters were modelled after important figures in Woolf's life. St. John Hirst is a fictional portrayal of Lytton Strachey, and Helen Ambrose is, to some extent, inspired by Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell. Rachel's journey from a cloistered life in a London suburb to freedom, challenging intellectual discourse and self-discovery very likely reflects Woolf's own journey from a repressive household to the intellectual stimulation of the Bloomsbury Group. Towards the novel's end, Rachel Vinrace dies of a fever.

Writing in 1926, E. M. Forster described it as "... 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". Reviewing the book a decade earlier, he wrote this: "It is absolutely unafraid... Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path." Literary scholar Phyllis Rose writes in her introduction to the novel, "No later novel of Woolf's will capture so brilliantly the excitement of youth." And also the excitement and challenge of life. "It's not cowardly to wish to live," says one old man at the end of the book. "It's the very reverse of cowardly. Personally, I'd like to go on for a hundred years... Think of all the things that are bound to happen!"

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*“It's the very reverse of cowardly. Personally, I'd like to go on for a hundred years... Think of all the things that are bound to happen!”*

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**Why The Voyage Out Still Matters**

Read today, The Voyage Out offers more than the curiosity of a famous writer's beginning. It preserves the risks, experiments, and unresolved tensions of a literary voice before later success made that voice familiar.

*Return to the beginning, and discover how The Voyage Out first opened the path ahead.*