The Voyage Out (Modern Library) - Hardcover

Woolf, Virginia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679640282 ISBN 13: 9780679640288

Publisher: Modern Library, 2000

Synopsis

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 short essay 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."

About this title

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.

About the Author:

Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours won the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His other novels include A Home at the End of the World and Blood. He lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Modern Library
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0679640282
• ISBN 13: 9780679640288
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 528