The Voyage Out

I’m sitting in front of my computer screen wondering which of several angles to choose in order to make this review something more than just another account of the plot and characters of <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/551482.The_Voyage_Out" title="The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">The Voyage Out (1915)</a>. <br><br>My copy of the book is on the desk beside me and I’m sorting through the various passages I’ve underlined looking for the slant that will please me most. The following line describing leading character Helen Ambrose catches my eye: <i>She had her embroidery frame set up on deck, with a little table by her side on which lay open a black volume of philosophy.</i> <br><br>Helen Ambrose’s fictional existence is happening one hundred years before my real-life one but in some respects we aren’t very different. Like me, Helen is a middle-aged woman who reads a lot. Unlike me, Helen can’t share thoughts about books with the world via a computer screen; her book thoughts are kept within the confines of her mind while her creative urges are directed instead towards her embroidery screen. But Helen, as we soon find out, likes to do things differently, even when it comes to embroidery: <i>she chose a thread from the vari-coloured tangle that lay in her lap, and sewed red into the bark of a tree, or yellow into a river torrent</i>. <br><br>I’d like to think that Helen and I are a little alike in how we see the world; tree bark isn’t always brown nor rivers always blue, just as book reviews don’t always have to follow a standard format and limit themselves to summaries of the plot and lists of the characters.<br><br>If this book were a painting instead of a novel, it would be focused entirely on Helen so intrinsic to everything is her role in Woolf’s composition. <br><input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="79a7a3b9-d7aa-4e59-aa7c-b22b70313098" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="79a7a3b9-d7aa-4e59-aa7c-b22b70313098"><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1427653018i/14302106.jpg" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy">Embroidery Frame, Mary Cassatt</label><br><br>At times, and Helen’s embroidery is just one example, the themes, and the treatment of them, harken back to the nineteenth century. At other times, the thoughts and speeches which Woolf gives her characters, and Helen in particular, would not be out of place in a novel of the twenty-first century. <br><br>Woolf deliberately recalls nineteenth century novels to our attention, those of Jane Austin and Charlotte Brontë in particular; I’ve noted several examples in the updates. She even has the characters discuss Austen and Brontë at one point:<br><br><i>'Wuthering Heights! said Clarissa, 'Ah---that’s more in my line. I really couldn’t exist without the Brontës! Don’t you love them? Still, on the whole, I’d rather live without them than without Jane Austin.’<br>‘Jane Austin? I don’t like Jane Austin,’ said Rachel.<br>‘You monster!’ Clarissa explained. ‘I can only just forgive you. Tell me why?’<br>‘She’s so---so---well, so like a tight plait,’ Rachel floundered.</i><br><br>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 <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/14935.Sense_and_Sensibility" title="Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen" rel="noopener">Sense and Sensibility</a>, or, on a less passionate day, a Lucy Snowe from Brontë’s <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/31173.Villette" title="Villette by Charlotte Brontë" rel="noopener">Villette</a>. 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. <br><br>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, <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/14942.Mrs__Dalloway" title="Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">Mrs. Dalloway</a>, alongside her husband Richard, mercifully given a more mute role in the later work than he has here. The other male characters in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/148905.The_Voyage_Out" title="The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">The Voyage Out</a> are prototypes of Jacob Flanders from <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/225396.Jacob_s_Room" title="Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">Jacob's Room</a>, and Neville, Louis and Bernard from <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/46114.The_Waves" title="The Waves by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">The Waves</a>. There is also an artist character in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/148905.The_Voyage_Out" title="The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">The Voyage Out</a>, a foreshadowing of Lily Briscoe in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/59716.To_the_Lighthouse" title="To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">To the Lighthouse</a>. There are even hints of the exoticism of <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/18839.Orlando" title="Orlando by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">Orlando</a> to be found here.<br><br>So <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/148905.The_Voyage_Out" title="The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">The Voyage Out</a> is a one-way voyage in several senses; not only is it a one-way journey for the quasi-heroine Rachel, it is also a one-way trip away from the nineteenth century novel, outward bound towards what will become the twentieth-century novel as Woolf will very soon imagine it.</["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]>

How flimsy are the accroutrements of civilisation in the face of nature. <br /><br />It’s like it took Virginia a third of this novel to get out of her Victorian stays, chemises, petticoats and corsets. Once she shakes off all the Victorian trappings though she moves with beautiful poise and clarity of purpose. So, it’s quite heavy footed to begin with, not as modern in tone and treatment as Forster who had already written a couple of his novels when she wrote this. It’s as if Woolf has to free herself of tradition by first embracing it. She does this by creating a background cast of Victorian characters, elderly spinsters and erudite emotionally retarded elderly men and embarking on what seems a comedy of manners. Not perhaps Woolf’s forte – though, that said, it does have some fabulous comic moments and made me laugh out loud at least three times. <br /><br />It’s clear Woolf couldn’t help thinking of the older generation as enemies and her foremost inclination is to ridicule them. This inclination muddies the early part of the novel a bit. Forster was better at characterising elderly interfering women, mainly because he sympathised with them and was able to write about them with tenderness as well as mockery whereas Woolf seems to find it difficult to overcome a snobbishly scornful point of view. Also, in the name of realism – we’re in a busy hotel - she duplicates characters which means it’s hard to differentiate some of the women. There are probably too many. Woolf is much more engaging in this novel when she’s writing about people of her own generation. In fact the novel becomes infinitely more compelling every time Rachel is its prevailing voice. There’s nothing of the comedy of manners genre about Rachel. Woolf is on the hunt for what’s fugitive about Rachel. Already there are signs of her ambition to write a new kind of biography which she was to achieve in such a brilliant and ground-breaking manner in The Waves. <br /><br />The tone of the novel becomes kinder, warmer, when love arrives, the spinsters and middle aged married women are treated with more tenderness, and the novel improves massively as a result. If the first half was a three star read, the second half is a five star read. <br /><br />It’s poignant that the young lover uses the exact same words to describe a relationship as Woolf herself was to use in her suicide note to Leonard. It also provides an insight into what Woolf herself went through as a young woman. I suspect the descriptions of Rachel’s illness were inspired by her own breakdowns. Thanks to Michael’s comment below I’ve been thinking about what Woolf says about love in this novel. Rachel offers lots of insights into Woolf herself, a woman who seemed to live without sexual passion. For Rachel love is like a river that takes her deeper inside herself; it doesn’t, as it does to most, bring her out of herself. It heralds a deeper silence rather than a louder singing. It’s closer to death than it is to life. It’s probably worth remembering Woolf had already attempted suicide before writing this. This might mean she had a greater need than most to believe in the transformative powers of love but at the same time less faith in those powers. I thought the last two chapters were incredibly powerful and haunting – and perhaps a little depressing - as an attempt to examine the testament of love. Brings me back again to her suicide note to Leonard – “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” And yet these were two people who had never made love. All Woolf’s romantic conflicts are encapsulated in that one line.<br /><br />It’s been a long time since I read this. I was surprised by how good it is. Especially the second half, the depiction of young love and illness, which is inspired. Lovely to renew my twenty-year-old love affair with Virginia Woolf. <br />

Three things happened to me while voyaging on the underground because of this book:<br /><br />1) As I admire Virginia Woolf immensely and identify with her issues and topics, I tried very hard to concentrate deeply enough to be able to read in a very distractive environment - squished into a full train. <br /><br />I fought against all odds to read the following paragraph:<br /><br />"She was deep in the fifth book, stopping indeed to pencil a note, when a pair of boots dropped, one after another, on the floor above her. She looked up and speculated. Whose boots were they, she wondered. <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="f2e5b323-57d1-4305-bf17-35e657b6f2cc" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="f2e5b323-57d1-4305-bf17-35e657b6f2cc"> This leading me to check the shoes around me before continuing... </label> She then became aware of a swishing sound next door - a woman clearly, putting away her dress. It was succeeded by a gentle tapping sound, such as that which accompanies hairdressing. <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="8506866e-51a8-4177-b14c-39c723b3640e" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="8506866e-51a8-4177-b14c-39c723b3640e"> Tapping sound around me rather caused by people typing into their phones...</label> It was very difficult to keep the attention fixed on "The Prelude". <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="338ecb47-0470-4b22-a6c2-85412732805a" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="338ecb47-0470-4b22-a6c2-85412732805a"> I am NOT surprised... </label> Was it Susan Warrington tapping? She forced herself, however, to read to the end of the book, <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="cc69be07-94e7-4ac0-8abd-c2c8e7ebcf04" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="cc69be07-94e7-4ac0-8abd-c2c8e7ebcf04"> Yes, I CAN concentrate on this! </label> when she placed a mark between the pages, sighed contentedly, and then turned out the light."<br /><br />At this point I close my book, and say to Virginia Woolf in my head that I actually had more distraction than her character, but still managed to finish the paragraph before looking up. When I do, triumphantly, I realise I have missed my station. <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="107dd25c-b21f-4e00-a5a5-c45e37e14f60" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="107dd25c-b21f-4e00-a5a5-c45e37e14f60"> Inappropriate words follow... </label> We just travel so much faster than in 1915! But we get equally annoyed when we are off track, so I guess it is more a change of transportation technology than one in human character!<br /><br />2) 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:<br /><br />"One can be very nice without having read a book, she asserted."<br /><br />I did not dare being honest with the (nice) person who politely asked what I thought was so funny.<br /><br />3) 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!<br /><br />So let's just say that I have taken "The Voyage Out" on a journey of its own, exposed it to the society in which I live and breathe and read. And when it comes to characters, plots and settings, I find Virginia's universe still quite intact, despite our advanced technology. More than once, I thought of what she would have written about my contemporaries, who try to "open my mind to the modern world" in the same way the Dalloways and other socialites try to "open" the erudite Oxbridge minds of that time, who unfortunately do not know how o dress for dinner.<br /><br />More than once, this book sent me on literary voyages out, following the idea from <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/18521.A_Room_of_One_s_Own" title="A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">A Room of One's Own</a>:<br /><br />"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately!"<br /><br />When one of the characters quotes Shakespeare's line "Fathom Five Thy Father Lies", I can't remember which play it is from, and while checking that, I stumble upon Sylvia Plath's "Fathom Five" before finding "The Tempest", so that one line in Virginia Woolf makes me embark on a voyage to revisit two other cherished authors before returning to my main reading focus.<br /><br />The world of the Belle Epoque is painted in all its splendour and natural self-confidence while containing all the signs of a world soon to be changed forever by World War I. This truly is a novel of modernity in the making, showing the old values still in place, but questioned more and more. Just like Philip Carey in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/31548.Of_Human_Bondage" title="Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham" rel="noopener">Of Human Bondage</a>, published the same year, the characters increasingly see life as something without greater purpose, something meaningless and thrilling at the same time.<br /><br />When Clarissa Dalloway exclaims: "How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!" that resonates with our time's craving for interesting crime rather than virtuous mediocrity. But it also shows the strange carelessness which is a prelude to the highly unnecessary Great War. The novel was begun in 1907, at the time when Picasso experimented with the break-up of the traditional correspondence between colour and form and object, most notably evident in "The Demoiselles D'Avignon". This development towards a new interpretation of the world is very much visible in "The Voyage Out" as well, where many facets, colours and ideas are brought together in a painting of a society in a state of change.<br /><br />I thoroughly enjoyed being part of this journey towards modernism!

Virginia Woolf writes her stories like no other. They are never plot-driven but are almost always centered around the characters and their inner thoughts and psychologies. This very feature has both attracted and deterred the reader. I belong to the former category. I love the way Virginia penetrates deeper into her characters, exposing their inner thoughts and showing what leads to their different character traits. In this way, she breathes life into her characters. They become real in the eyes of the readers so, connecting with them is smooth and natural. Also, Virginia's writing is like that of no other. Heavenly is no exaggeration to describe it. As I've mentioned in my reviews of her books, she takes me to another realm with her poetic prose and her clever metaphors. They talk to some inner part of me that has no connection with the work at hand. Her rhythm of writing calms me, and her every word pleases me. When I'm in a turbulent mood, she brings me peace.<br /><br />Virginia's stories are quite unusual. Their brilliance lies in their depth. In every work of hers, she goes on in search of life and its true spirit. In <i>The Voyage Out</i>, young Rachel Vinrace, temporarily freed from her protected environment, goes on a "voyage" in search of the meaning of her life. Stepping onto the world suddenly, Rachel discovers that she is unable to connect with it. Her timidity and shyness prevent her from making any closer acquaintances, and the lack of her personal development makes her awkward. Yet, her clever instincts and her power of observation help her understand and connect with the world and people around her enough to find love, happiness, and contentment. Although she doesn't fully realize her expectations due to tragic circumstances, she learns enough of her true self to find inner peace and contentment. But this story doesn't belong to Rachel Vinrace alone. It also belongs to Helen, Terrence, St. John, Evelyn, and all the rest. Like Rachel, they too, with their different backgrounds, education, age, and gender, are searching for the meaning of life and seeking their place in the world. <br /><br />The story is tragic, and the tone is melancholic. It is depressing, yet at the same time, curiously soothing. It amazes me how Virginia arouses opposing emotions through her writing. It shows her extraordinary gift in literary craftsmanship. <br /><br /><i>The Voyage Out</i> is Virginia Woolf's first novel. Even then she has been quite obsessed with the "voyage" to find the true meaning and true path in life. In the story, her characters take on a physical voyage from their home in England to South America. While on this physical voyage out, interacting with one another, they also take on a voyage out into their inner selves, questioning, and re-questioning who they truly are. The physical and mental "voyages" complement and completes each other and produces one journey in search of self. Virginia's ability to strike this physical and mental balance in her very first work says a lot about her potential, which was fully developed later. <br /><br />The book was written at the beginning of Virginia's own voyage to find her true place in the world of literature while she was discovering and realizing her full potential as an author. However, as her first major literary product, the novel deserves credit.

Rachel Vinrace sets out on a voyage from the confines of her home in England, where she is raised by her spinster aunts, to the exotic coast of South America in the early twentieth century. But more than just the physical journey from one shore to another, <b>The Voyage Out</b> is a story of the transformation of this essentially unworldly girl to a more self-possessed woman in love with the seemingly enlightened yet searching young writer, Terence Hewet. Some of the most lovely and illuminating writing flowed from Virginia Woolf’s hand as she wrote the words to describe the conversations as well as the innermost thoughts of her characters. Rachel reflects on her feelings as she sits in the room where she attended her first dance as a yet inexperienced girl at the South American hotel: <i>“She could hardly believe it was the same room. It had looked so bare and so bright and formal on that night when they came into it out of the darkness… now the room was dim and quiet, and beautiful silent people passed through it… the methods by which she had reached her present position, seemed to her very strange, and the strangest thing about them was that she had not known where they were leading her. That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret… but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.”</i><br /><br />When I first started reading <b>The Voyage Out</b>, I was not sure I would like it. Initially, I had a bit of difficulty keeping the various characters and names straight in my head. I wasn’t sure about them- I didn’t know if I liked any of them. But, as the ship reached the shore and each character was drawn so meaningfully, I was hooked. Feminism and the constraints faced by women during this time, marriage, and the individuality of persons are all issues examined very thoroughly here. Each person, man or woman, has his or her own struggles to which we become privy. Evelyn, another tormented young woman, is distressed over multiple marriage proposals and the desire to remain independent. <i>“I thought the other day on that mountain how I’d have liked to be one of those colonists, to cut down trees and make laws and all that, instead of fooling about with all these people who think one’s just a pretty young lady. Though I’m not. I really must do something.”</i> Surely, Evelyn was one of many women to suffer due to the barriers placed on her gender. Women are not the only ones here that agonize over life choices, self-examination, and the pursuit of happiness. As Hewet realizes he has fallen in love with Rachel, he frequently broods over his ideas surrounding the institution of marriage. He draws various pictures in his mind of married couples sitting together in a firelit room. <i>“These pictures were very unpleasant… He tried all sorts of pictures, taking them from the lives of friends of his, for he knew many different married couples…When, on the other hand, he began to think of unmarried people, he saw them active in an unlimited world; above all, standing on the same ground as the rest, without shelter or advantage. All the most individual and humane of his friends were bachelors and spinsters."</i><br /> <br />Complex characters, vivid and beautiful descriptions of the exotic surroundings, and very real human internal struggles all make for a brilliant novel that one should savor slowly and thoroughly. Ms. Woolf has left me wanting more and wondering how and when we can truly achieve personal peace and happiness. I believe this is a question she could not quite answer herself. I plan to read more of her work to see if she can shed any more light on this human voyage. <br />

القراءة الثانية لرواية فرجينيا وولف بالترجمة العربية <br />أول رواية للكاتبة وبداية لأدب مهتم بالمرأة وأحوالها الخاصة والمجتمعية<br />رحلة بطلة الرواية للخروج من عالمها الضيق المحدود <br />إلى عالم واسع عامر بالتجوال والمشاهدات واللقاءات <br />ومحاولات لم تكتمل لاكتشاف البشر والنفس والمشاعر المخفية

Self-consciously recalling the fiction of Jane Austen, <i>The Voyage Out</i> makes strange the conventions of the nineteenth-century British novel. Woolf's first novel, published in 1915 in the midst of the First World War, echoes so many features of the past century's most popular form of literature. Be it the story's creaky adherence to the marriage plot or the omniscient narrator's stilted interest in the female protagonist's moral education, most of the novel dutifully relies on conventions it knows to be outmoded. Then, at the moment when the narrative seems to be nearing its preordained conclusion, Woolf begins to unravel the genre—first gently, then aggressively. The book unexpectedly ends on a morbid note that signals the author's desire for a new type of novel more in step with the modern world.

<br /><i>“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”</i><br /> <b>― Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction</b><br /><br /><br />If we look at her works, what we evidently notice is that the idea which most engages Virginia Woolf is that of life itself. Life as it is witnessed every day, the transition from one moment to the other and everything that comes in between. A life not symmetrically arranged in a destined pattern but lived in the consciousness enfolding it. A life gleaming in the perception of fleeting flashes. A life resonating with ripples of thoughts, dispersing and then converging with other thoughts, forming a current creating eddies one moment and in other letting the stream run swiftly along the way. A life pounding with emotions: a relentless cascade from one end to the other. <br /><br />In her first novel Virginia sets on a voyage to discover this idea, to understand her own relation with the notions lying concealed underneath mind and constituting life, her relation with people in her life, with a world largely unfamiliar till her twenties or with the notions like relation between men and women, a woman’s position in society, happiness, beauty, time, space and delirium. And though one misses her masterful strokes visible much clearly in her later works, one cannot help but admire the efforts undertaken during her first excursion.<br /><br />When she speaks of the room to be provided to Rachel during her stay with the Ambroses at the island, we perceive the outline for a need of having a room for oneself: <br /><br /><i>“Among the promises which Mrs. Ambrose had made her niece should she stay was a room cut off from the rest of the house, large, private—a room in which she could play, read, think, defy the world, a fortress as well as a sanctuary. Rooms, she knew, became more like worlds than rooms at the age of twenty-four. Her judgment was correct, and when she shut the door Rachel entered an enchanted place, where the poets sang and things fell into their right proportions.”</i><br /><br /><br />Hewet’s conversation with Rachel about women brings forth Woolf’s deliberation on the discrimination that women were subjected to in the society:<br /><br /><i>“There it was going on in the background, for all those thousands of years, this curious silent unrepresented life. Of course we're always writing about women— abusing them, or jeering at them, or worshipping them; but it's never come from women themselves. I believe we still don't know in the least how they live, or what they feel, or what they do precisely.”</i><br /><br />One’s inescapable relation with time, whether exterior or interior time, which figures so prominently in her later works is also dealt with here:<br /><br /><i>“As <b>midday</b> drew on, and the sun beat straight upon the roof, an eddy of great flies droned in a circle; iced drinks were served under the palms; the long blinds were pulled down with a shriek, turning all the light yellow. The clock now had a silent hall to tick in, and an audience of four or five somnolent merchants. By degrees white figures with shady hats came in at the door, admitting a wedge of the hot summer day, and shutting it out again. After resting in the dimness for a minute, they went upstairs. Simultaneously, the <b>clock wheezed one</b>, and the gong sounded, beginning softly, working itself into a frenzy, and ceasing. There was a pause. Then all those who had gone upstairs came down; cripples came, planting both feet on the same step lest they should slip; prim little girls came, holding the nurse's finger; fat old men came still buttoning waistcoats. The gong had been sounded in the garden, and by degrees recumbent figures rose and strolled in to eat, since the time had come for them to feed again.”</i><br /><br />Her love for circles and eddies is quite clearly manifested as there are not only direct references in some scenes e.g. in dance scene at the party in the hotel but also where we are made to go round and round in the mind of one character or swirled from the mind of one character to the other, though it lacks her signature deftness since this shifting is mostly aided through a third person narrative using a direct style. Regardless, it doesn’t impede the narration. The only hitch in the novel, as far as her writing is concerned I believe, is the part where Rachel and Hewet’s relation post engagement is portrayed because here Woolf seems to be struggling, almost dragging her words.<br /><br />There is also a passing reference to the group of Bloomsbury and to Mrs. Dalloway’s love of flowers. And while reader is smitten, wondering how Virginia gives a little of herself to each of her characters, there comes the final convergence - death of Rachel. The depiction of Rachel’s state of delirium towards the end is so vivid as to be suggestive of Virginia’s own scuffle but what is more absorbing is Virginia’s attempt at bringing the characters together, through their thoughts, after Rachel’s death. Here too she seems to be engaging, with the process of <i>“tunneling”</i> which she exercised comprehensively in Mrs. Dalloway.<br /><br />It is worthwhile going through the journey of reading her first novel because it does, in so many ways, make one feel closer to the wonderful writer while providing more insight into her person and into the ideas that defined her life and her works.<br />

"To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently. It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for."<br /><br />As this is Virginia Woolf's very first novel, I'm not sure just what I was expecting here. Woolf is a favourite author of mine, with her unique style capturing me rather early on. I didn't enjoy this as much as <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/18521.A_Room_of_One_s_Own" title="A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">A Room of One's Own</a>, but this was still a notable work of Woolf's, and one that is exquisitely written. <br /><br />The story is about a voyage from England to South America, so much of the story is based upon the actual ship, then some of it at a hotel in South America. <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/148905.The_Voyage_Out" title="The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">The Voyage Out</a> primarily tells Rachel's story, but we have lots of different and somewhat interesting characters to meet on the journey. <br /><br />These characters have different traits which Woolf develops wonderfully, and we mainly learn these through the interactions these characters have about love, life, politics and even gender roles. Let's be honest; many of these issues are still issues today, especially the expectations of men and women. I loved how Woolf included all of this within her story. We are also introduced to Clarissa Dalloway, one of Woolf's most notable character's, and a one I'm looking forward to meeting in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/14942.Mrs__Dalloway" title="Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">Mrs. Dalloway</a>, later on this year. <br /><br />Sometimes I noticed that Woolf shifts from one character to another rather rapidly, and at times, it is difficult to tell whom she is speaking of. I somehow got used to this, and tried not to let it ruin my overall enjoyment of the novel, although, I think this could bother some. <br /><br />The beautiful imagery Woolf conjures up in the reader's mind is amazing. I loved how she describes the ship in particular, especially when the storm hits when crossing to South America. She really made me feel like I was actually there. <br /><br />I find Woolf's style to be unique and invigorating, and this was a gorgeously written debut novel. I'm looking forward to my next adventure with her and I'm hoping that will be sooner, rather than later.

"We may not always understand the pattern in front of us, Woolf seems to be saying, and we may spend the majority of our life isolated from others and trapped within our own experience, but only by reconnecting to the pattern through people and through art can we truly be alive," writes Pagan Harleman, the Woolf scholar who wrote this fascinating introduction to my Barnes and Noble Classics edition of <i>The Voyage Out.</i> <br /><br />This voyage out really seems to be a voyage in, into the conscious choices of several people of different backgrounds and ideologies who find their lives entangled. The question is whether the voyage is good for all, as life is faced with interminable problems and dismal consequences, as Rachel experiences, once she leaves her sheltered life. We learn Newton's Law of Motion, in school, but we never truly process it: <br /><i> <blockquote>He had never realized before that underneath every action, underneath the life of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to be able to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the edges of all action, eating away the lives of men and women.</blockquote> </i><br />You don't get climatic thought or action here (except for the vital scene towards the end and even that is arguably climatic) and I think this bothered me at first, for I was seeking some of the audacious consciousness of <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/116056.Night_and_Day" title="Night and Day by Virginia Woolf" rel="noopener">Night and Day</a>. I wasn't too thrilled with Rachel, the main character, or with Helen Ambrose, her aunt, although Clarissa Dalloway's frankness and Evelyn's feministic views piqued my interest. Rachel is a woman on a quest to understand the world of male-female relationships that has been hidden from her by her protective father. Helen Ambrose is on some inward journey herself (alongside her scholar-husband), a journey seemingly projected onto her young niece; although you never truly get to understand Helen, or her fascination and flirtation with the young scholars Hirst and Hewett. <br /><br />With Hewett and Rachel's interaction, there is a hint of Lawrence's technique in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/9784.Women_in_Love__Brangwen_Family___2_" title="Women in Love (Brangwen Family, #2) by D.H. Lawrence" rel="noopener">Women in Love</a>, that useful and entertaining technique of having male characters with feministic meanderings. These characters may be easily forgotten but their stances on life are not, particularly when female characters stand in for subserviency. They prod, they question, they discover, and this obsession with meaning is appealing.<br /><i> <blockquote>That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.</blockquote> </i><br />I read this novel once before, over a decade ago, but when I read it again, I applauded something I hadn't paid attention to before: Woolf's encapsulation of the smallness of one life, as relates to the vastness of the general concept of life. We are but specks on this great blanket called the universe, or "patches of light," as Rachel puts it, and ever so often we're faced with the painful reality of our somewhat insignificant existence. And yet there is much to live for, and so much to live through.