The Voyage Out (Collins Classics)

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The novel begins in London, then moves via a very convincing storm at sea to Portugal, where the Dalloways join the ship. This part of the narrative is quite credible, and is possibly based on a journey at sea Virginia Woolf made to Portugal with her younger brother Adrian in 1905. But after the Dalloways are dropped off (almost parenthetically) in North Africa the location switches with virtually no transition to the fictitious Santa Marina. 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. Chapter X. Rachel is reading modern literature and reflecting philosophically about the nature of life. She and Helen receive an invitation to Hewet’s expedition. The outing presents the radical young figure of Evelyn Murgatroyd, and Helen meets Terence Hewet, 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.

Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published.. Santa Marina. Fictional South American town where most of the action takes place. In this exotic setting Rachel might discover herself free from the usual Victorian restrictions for women. However, because the English tourists transport their class and gender expectations to the natural, unpretentious Santa Marina setting, Rachel does not escape the restrictions of Victorian society. The hotel that houses the English tourists and the Villa San Gervasio, where Rachel stays with the Ambroses, symbolize her struggle to find herself. Exoticized and romanticized through its picturesque mountains, dusty villages, and astonishing vistas, the landscape is depicted in an impressionistic manner which implies a freedom of vision, allowing Rachel the opportunity to develop free from the Victorian standards represented by the hotel guests. The tropical heat, cool water, and glorious lighting symbolize a fearful sensuality that directs Rachel toward self-discovery.

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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. Professor Dame Gillian Beer generously provided an illuminating Introduction, arguing that the first novel by Woolf is ‘amusing, gripping’ and even ‘discomfiting’ because ‘the end is emphatically not evident in its beginning … it is a true voyage out in which the future is not to be forecast’. 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 Keywords

J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1869) p. 523; quoted in Millett’s Sexual Politics, p. 103. Where Woolf seems boldest, however, and where we can see signs of the technical mastery that is to come, is in Woolf’s occasional use of free indirect style. Sometimes she uses this technique as a Flaubertian tool of irony, exposing the distance between her characters’ thoughts and her own, as when describing the Emma Bovary-like romantic dreams of Evelyn: “‘D’you think Garibaldi was ever up here?’ she asked Mr. Hirst. Oh, if she had been his bride! If, instead of a picnic party, this was a party of patriots, and she, red-shirted like the rest, had lain among grim men, flat on the turf, aiming her gun at the white turrets beneath them, screening her eyes to pierce through the smoke” (130). More complexly, Woolf sometimes uses free indirect style to render the voice of the community and its standards, what Roland Barthes called the reference code. Here, we see the recently engaged Susan thinking: “Marriage, marriage, that was the right thing, the only thing, the solution required by every one she knew…” (179). This is Woolf’s subtlest melding of different voices within the novel. Woolf writes in the authorial third person, but the words appear to be Susan’s. Perhaps more accurately, the words seem to be those of the community and culture from which Susan comes. We thus have the language of the community filtered through Susan filtered through Woolf. Franco Moretti describes Jane Austen’s use of free indirect style as “the composed, slightly resigned voice of the well-socialized individual,” a language “halfway between social doxa and the individual voice.” [5] Even at this early stage, Woolf was accomplishing this balancing act between the voice of the community and the voice of the character. Her intermingling of voices would only become bolder in her future writing. Nevertheless, it showed all the promise of her later work that would include stream of consciousness writing and themes of sexuality and death. DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980. Discusses the novel’s inception, drafts, inspirations for characters and events, and themes. Detailed comparisons of drafts offer insight into Woolf’s creative process. An accessible source.One must, then, question Hermione Lee’s argument that childless, fussy Mrs Elliot, absent-minded Mrs Thornbury, bovine Susan Warrington and her tyrannical old aunt, and the would-be liberated flirt, Evelyn M., are callous caricatures. There is little warmth even in the treatment of the kind academic spinster, Miss Allan, or of the jolly eccentric Mrs Flushing. The tone for the presentation of the minor characters is feebly satirical. (Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (London: Methuen, 1977) p. 38) Indeed, it is difficult to see how we could know that Miss Allan is kind or Mrs Flushing jolly unless it is through Woolf’s sympathetic treatment of them. Jean Guiget’s description of the hotel visitors as ‘a set of grotesque and ungainly puppets’ is equally inappropriate (Jean Guiget, Virginia Woolf and her Works, trans. Jean Stewart (London: Hogarth Press, 1965) p. 202). To describe the novel’s minor characters in these terms is to make the mistake of accepting Rachel’s response to them as authoritative. James Haule (Winter 1982). "Review: Virginia Woolf". Contemporary Literature. 23 (1): 100–104. doi: 10.2307/1208147. JSTOR 1208147. Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid. 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. Metadata services officer Simon Cooper with Virginia Woolf’s copy of her first novel The Voyage Out. Photograph: Stefanie Zingsheim

Woolf began work on The Voyage Out by 1910 (perhaps as early as 1907) and had finished an early draft by 1912. The novel had a long and difficult gestation; it was not published until 1915, as it was written during a period in which Woolf was especially psychologically vulnerable. [1] She suffered from periods of depression and at one point attempted suicide. [2] The resultant work contained the seeds of all that would blossom in her later work: the innovative narrative style, the focus on feminine consciousness, sexuality and death. [3] 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) This practical and insightful reading guide offers a complete summary and analysis of The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf. It provides a thorough exploration of the novel’s plot, characters and main themes, including women’s position in society and the limitations of words as a mode of expression. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. 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).Rose, Phyllis. Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Offers in one chapter on The Voyage Out a compelling discussion that focuses on Woolf’s use of character to explore social and philosophical issues. 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. Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts