The voyage out - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586044515 ISBN 13: 9780586044513

Publisher: Grafton Books, 1978

Synopsis

Rachel Vinrace is twenty-four. She has been sheltered with love, but is now ready to discover 'life', to take the voyage out.

Moving away from Richmond means a real journey, for Rachel is going to travel to South America on her father's steamer. She will, in the intimacy of shipboard life, discover the fashionable world of Mrs Dalloway, the academic arrogance of a Cambridge don and first love in the shape of Terence Hewlet who wishes that women could be the same as men...

This is Virginia Woolf's first novel. Written in a simple, flowing way, it is immediately accesible, thoroughly delightful. There are only hints of the radical innovations of her later novels, but the preoccupations which were to appear and reappear are already present. Even in this, her earliest work, the true originality which is the mark of her genius is present and wonderfully alive.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

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.
Less formally experimental than her later novels, The Voyage Out none-theless clearly lays bare the poetic style and innovative technique--with its multiple figures of consciousness, its detailed portraits of characters' inner lives, and its constant shifting between the quotidian and the profound--that are the signature of Woolf's fiction.
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."
This edition includes a new Introduction by Michael Cunningham, bestselling author of "The Hours. Cunningham at once unfolds an engaging shortessay of Woolf's early life and career, an insightful exploration of the themes to which Woolf returns again and again in her fiction, and a spirited defense of the relevance and lasting importance of her art. Katherine Anne Porter wrote of Woolf: "The world of arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly."

From the Back Cover

The Voyage Out (1915) is the story of a rite of passage. When Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship she is launched on a course of self-discovery in a modern version of the mythic voyage. Virginia Woolf knew all too well the forms that she was supposed to follow when writing of a young lady's entrance into the world, and she struggled to subvert the conventions, wittily and assiduously, rewriting and revising the novel many times. The finished work is not, on the face of it, a 'portrait of the artist'. However, through The Voyage Out readers discover Woolf as an emerging and original artist: not identified with the heroine, but present everywhere in the social satire, the lyricism, and the patterning of consciousness.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grafton Books
• Publication date: 1978
• ISBN 10: 0586044515
• ISBN 13: 9780586044513
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 382