276°
Posted 20 hours ago

The Voyage Out (Collins Classics)

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

It all starts out in London in the early twentieth century, following the life of Helen Ambrose and her husband Ridley. They are preparing for a long journey ahead, to an unnamed location off the coast of South America. There they are planning to stay for the whole of winter, leaving their two young children behind. She is a little downcast as she walks around with a sense of sadness and a touch of depressing emotions. There isn’t much light at the beginning of this tale. Rachel falls in love with a young Englishman, Terence, in Santa Marina. But tragically, she falls ill and dies. Yet, in the brief time that Helen and Terence have known her, her journey has also made them reflect about their own lives. Absolutely unafraid . . . Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path.”—E. M. Forster 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. These people all talk smartly, and one rather wonders what it is all about, for it does not seem to get anywhere in particular. Rachel has been kept by her father in ignorance of everything which might be presumed to injure the mind of a “young person.”

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 III. In Portugal, Richard and Clarissa Dalloway are taken on board as extra passengers. At dinner there is conversation on the arts and politics, after which Clarissa writes a satirical letter criticising the other guests. Her husband joins her, and they both feel superior but sympathetic towards their fellow travellers. Chapter XXIII. Rachel is annoyed by people’s inquisitiveness now that she is engaged. A message from home brings news of the suicide of a housemaid. A ‘prostitute’ is expelled from the hotel. Hirst admits to himself that he is unhappy, but he brings himself to congratulate Hewet and Rachel. There are two known copies of the first edition that Woolf is known to have used to record her intended alterations ahead of the 1920 re-issue in the USA. The first is in a private collection in the USA.

The voyage out

Compare Huxley’s comments on Burlap’s feelings for his dead wife in Point Counter Point: ‘These agonies which Burlap, by a process of intense concentration on the idea of his loss and grief, had succeeded in churning up within himself were in no way proportionate or even related to his feelings for the living Susan’ (Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928) p. 231). 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 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. Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale (London: Chapman & Hall, 1908) p. 36. (Hereafter all references to this novel appear parenthetically within the text.)

While it’s not considered Virginia Woolf’s greatest effort, literary history has nonetheless proven this reviewer wrong. In fact Woolf’s next novel, Night and Day (1919) is far more conventional. Another young middle-class woman, Katharine Hilbery, is facing the limited social choices offered to her in life – but the novel is grounded in a family saga and a rather complex love quadrangle.] Chapter IX. In the hotel, people are preparing for the night. Hirst and Hewet discuss the possibility of organising a party excursion. Next day there is desultory chat over tea until Ridley Ambrose joins with Hirst and Hewet.

Chapter XX. The Flushings, along with Hewet and Hirst plus Rachel and Helen go on the expedition. They sail upstream in a small ship. Hewet is very conscious of Rachel’s presence. They go on a walk together in to the forest – to declare their love for each other. When they return to the ship they feel detached from their companions.

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. 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). Chapter I. Ridley Ambrose and his wife Helen are leaving London to join their ship, the Euphrosyne which is due to take them on a cruise to South America. They join their niece, Rachel Vinrace, whose father owns the ship. A fellow traveller, Mr Pepper reminisces critically with Ambrose about their contemporaries at Cambridge. They are then joined by the captain Willoughby Vinrace. Instead we are presented with what Rachel Vinrace calls for during the events of the novel –“Why don’t people write about the things they do feel?” . Despite all the symbolism of a first journey away from home, a first love affair, and the dawning of mature consciousness which Rachel experiences, the bulk of the novel is taken up with what people say and think about each other. This was a bold alternative to the plot-driven novels of the late Victorian era. Woolf’s criticism of a great many novelists — and particularly women — centres upon the fact that they use their writing as a vehicle for confessional autobiography. A writer is, perhaps, particularly likely to use the first novel to unburden personal obsessions and experiences. Given that this is the case, the ‘objective’ tone of Woolf’s own first novel is the more remarkable. In writing The Voyage Out Woolf did, of course, draw upon the details of her own life. One thinks, for example, of her mental instability, her sister Vanessa’s illness and brother Thoby’s death from typhoid, her voyage to Spain and Portugal with her younger brother Adrian in the spring of 1905, and, particularly, her interest in feminism. 1 In the novel, though, these personal experiences are transformed from autobiography into fiction. 2 The emphasis in The Voyage Out falls not upon Woolf the private individual, but upon her fictional characters. It is primarily the lives of these latter, rather than that of the author, which sustain our interest. 3 KeywordsThe Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf was the first novel by this iconic English author, published in Britain in 1915 and in the U.S. in 1920. Written at a point when Woolf was suffering from an acute period of mental illness during which there was a suicide attempt, the novel proceeded painfully slowly.

David Daiches comments: The Victorian novelist tended on the whole to produce a narrative art whose patterns were determined by a public sense of values. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, sensitive to the decay of public values in her time, preferred the more exacting task of patterning events in terms of her personal vision, which meant that she had on her hands the additional technical job of discovering devices for convincing the reader, at least during his period of reading, of the significance and reality of this vision. (David Daiches, Virginia Woolf, 2nd edn (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963; 1st edn 1942) p. 154) Like many other Woolf readers, I came late to The Voyage Out, having already delighted in her better-known works such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves. But as Gillian Beer says, this novel holds its own and deserves celebration. It marks the first steps of a great writer into the twentieth-century literary world; the arrival of someone who would become a towering presence in English writing. So it is not strange that one night she permits Mr. Dalloway to kiss her and confesses that she rather likes the sensation. Later, Rachel is turned over to Helen to be brought up as her father would wish–that is, a proper kind of English young lady. Chapter VII. The ship reaches Santa Marina. Its colonial history is described. The Ambrose villa San Gervasio is dilapidated. After a week Mr Pepper decamps to a local hotel because he thinks the vegetables are not properly cooked at dinner.

Review of The Voyage Out in the New York Times (1920)

Later, Louise de Salvo, a Woolf scholar reconstructed the novel from earlier drafts and released it as M elymbrosia(Woolf’s original title) in 1981. What motivated Woolf to revise her text? She made revisions in the aftermath of her breakdown, and after her literary career was revived with her second novel, Night and Day, published in 1919. This is a plausible theory. But does the evidence in Woolf’s corrections bear it out? There are two main places in the text where the majority of changes are indicated: both are pivotal moments in the narrative. Rachel Vinrace, Woolf’s first heroine, is a motherless young woman who, at twenty-four, embarks on a sea voyage with a party of other English folk to South America. Guileless, and with only a smattering of education, Rachel is taken under the wing of her aunt Helen, who desires to teach Rachel "how to live."Arriving in Santa Marina, a village on the South American coast, Rachel and Helen are introduced to a group of English expatriates. Among them is the young, sensitive Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer, with whom Rachel falls in love. But theirs is ultimately a tale of doomed love, set against a chorus of other stories and other points of view, as the narrative shifts focus between its central and peripheral characters. E. M. Forster praised The Voyage Out as "a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path."

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment