 Cover of the first edition of 1915 | |
| Author | Virginia Woolf |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Duckworth |
Publication date | 26 March 1915 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
The Voyage Out is the first novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1915 by Duckworth.
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 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]
In 1981, Louise DeSalvo published an alternative version of The Voyage Out featuring its original title, Melymbrosia. [4] Professor DeSalvo worked for seven years on the project of reconstructing the text of the novel as it might have appeared in 1912, before Woolf had begun serious revisions. She reviewed more than 1,000 manuscript pages from Woolf's private papers, dating the earlier versions of the work by small organisational clues such as the colour of ink used or noticing where a pen had last left off writing. [5] DeSalvo's Melymbrosia attempts to restore the text of the novel as Woolf had originally conceived it, containing more candid political commentary on such issues as homosexuality, women's suffrage, and colonialism. According to DeSalvo, Woolf was "warned by colleagues that publishing such an outspoken indictment of Britain could prove disastrous to her fledgling career". The work was heavily revised until it became the novel now known as The Voyage Out, which omits much of the political candour of the original. [6] DeSalvo's edition was reissued by Cleis Press in 2002.
Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship and is launched on a course of self-discovery in a kind of modern mythical voyage. The mismatched jumble of passengers provides Woolf with an opportunity to satirise Edwardian life. The novel introduces Clarissa Dalloway, the central character of Woolf's later novel, Mrs Dalloway . Two of the other characters were modelled after important figures in Woolf's life. St. John Hirst is a fictional portrayal of Lytton Strachey, and Helen Ambrose is, to some extent, inspired by Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell. [7] Rachel's journey from a cloistered life in a London suburb to freedom, challenging intellectual discourse and self-discovery very likely reflects Woolf's own journey from a repressive household to the intellectual stimulation of the Bloomsbury Group. [8] Toward the novel's end, Rachel Vinrace dies of a fever.
Writing in 1926, E. M. Forster described it as "... a strange, tragic, inspired book whose scene is a South America not found on any map and reached by a boat which would not float on any sea, an America whose spiritual boundaries touch Xanadu and Atlantis". [9] Reviewing the book a decade earlier, he wrote this: "It is absolutely unafraid... Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights , though by a different path." [10]
Literary scholar Phyllis Rose writes in her introduction to the novel, "No later novel of Woolf's will capture so brilliantly the excitement of youth." [11] And also the excitement and challenge of life. [12] "It's not cowardly to wish to live," says one old man at the end of the book. "It's the very reverse of cowardly. Personally, I'd like to go on for a hundred years... Think of all the things that are bound to happen!" [13]
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 second was acquired in 1976, by the University of Sydney, from a bookshop in London. This copy was mis-filed in the science section of the University of Sydney's rare books collection by mistake, as the call number was similar to that collection's numbers. It was re-discovered in 2021 during a re-cataloguing. this copy contains the carbon copies of notes in the other copy but, also and uniquely, Woolf's notes and some deletions (in Chapter 25) written in violet ink. This copy has Woolf's name written on the front flyleaf. The copy has been digitised and published by the university. [14]
The Voyage Out public domain audiobook at LibriVox 
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the early 20th century. Among the people involved in the group were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey. Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics, as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.
In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator.
Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf.
Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf published on 14 May 1925. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman in post-First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.
Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson, CH, usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer.
The Hogarth Press is a book publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that was founded as an independent company in 1917 by British authors Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. It was named after their house in Richmond, in which they began hand-printing books as a hobby during the interwar period.
To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centres on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.
The Waves is a 1931 novel by English novelist Virginia Woolf. It is critically regarded as her most experimental work, consisting of ambiguous and cryptic soliloquies spoken mainly by six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. Percival, a seventh character, appears in the soliloquies, though readers never hear him speak in his own voice.
The Hours, a 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham, is a tribute to Virginia Woolf's 1923 work Mrs. Dalloway; Cunningham emulates elements of Woolf's writing style while revisiting some of her themes within different settings. The Hours won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning 2002 film of the same name.
Cleis Press is an American independent publisher of books in the areas of sexuality, erotica, feminism, gay and lesbian studies, gender studies, fiction, and human rights. The press was founded in 1980 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It later moved to San Francisco and was based out of Berkeley until its purchase by Start Media in 2014. It was founded by Frédérique Delacoste, Felice Newman and Mary Winfrey Trautmann who collectively financed wrote and published the press's first book Fight Back: Feminist Resistance to Male Violence in 1981. In 1987, they published Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry by Delacoste with Priscilla Alexander.
The Hours is a 2002 psychological drama film directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman. Supporting roles are played by Ed Harris, John C. Reilly, Stephen Dillane, Jeff Daniels, Miranda Richardson, Allison Janney, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, and Eileen Atkins. The screenplay by David Hare is based on Michael Cunningham's 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name.
Monk's House is a 16th-century weatherboarded cottage in the village of Rodmell, three miles (4.8 km) south of Lewes, East Sussex, England. The writer Virginia Woolf and her husband, the political activist, journalist and editor Leonard Woolf, bought the house by auction at the White Hart Hotel, Lewes, on 1 July 1919 for 700 pounds, and received there many visitors connected to the Bloomsbury Group, including T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey. The purchase is described in detail in her Diary, vol. 1, pp. 286–8.
Louise A. DeSalvo was an American writer, editor, professor, and lecturer who lived in New Jersey. Much of her work focused on Italian American culture, though she was also a renowned Virginia Woolf scholar.
The Edwardians (1930) is one of Vita Sackville-West's later novels and a clear critique of the Edwardian aristocratic society as well as a reflection of her own childhood experiences. It belongs to the genre of the Bildungsroman and describes the development of the main character Sebastian within his social world, in this case the aristocracy of the early 20th century.
“I ... try to remember the smell of the bus that used to meet one at the station in 1908. The rumble of its rubberless tyres. The impression of waste and extravagance which assailed one the moment one entered the doors of the house. The crowds of servants; people’s names in little slits on their bedroom doors; sleepy maids waiting about after dinner in the passages. I find that these things are a great deal more vivid to me than many things which have occurred since, but will they convey anything whatever to anyone else? Still I peg on, and hope one day to see it all under the imprint of the Hogarth Press, in stacks in the bookshops.”
Mrs Dalloway is a 1997 British drama film, a co-production by the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Netherlands, directed by Marleen Gorris and stars Vanessa Redgrave, Natascha McElhone and Michael Kitchen.
Phyllis Rose is an American literary critic, essayist, biographer, and educator.
The Middle Ground is a 1980 novel by British novelist Margaret Drabble. It is her ninth published novel. The novel explores the "crisis of British urban life" through the eyes of a middle aged journalist, Kate Armstrong.
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown is an essay by Virginia Woolf published in 1924 which explores modernity.
The Hours is a 2022 opera in two acts with music by Kevin Puts and an English-language libretto by Greg Pierce, based on Michael Cunningham's 1998 novel and its 2002 film adaptation, both with the same title.
