The Voyage Out

Virginia Woolf is one of the most important authors in the development of the modern novel. Born in 1882 to an affluent London family devoted to the arts, Woolf was steeped in literature and culture from an early age. Education was highly segregated by gender at the time, and it was rare for women to have any education outside the home. Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was a celebrated historian and critic, her mother an activist and philanthropist, and her parents shared the work of educating her and her siblings. One of her sisters, Vanessa Bell, became a renowned modernist painter and eventually created the cover art for several of Woolf’s novels. When she was 15, Woolf enrolled in the Ladies’ Department at King’s College London. Her four years of study there exposed her to the women’s rights movement and to women in the arts. Woolf’s parents encouraged her to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. This unusual upbringing afforded Woolf the resources and connections that helped her to become one of the most influential authors in the English literary canon.

After their father died in 1904, Virginia and her sister Vanessa moved together into a house in London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood. There they formed the center of an intellectual circle that came to be known as The Bloomsbury Group, which included some of the most influential writers and thinkers of the era, among them the novelist E. M. Forster and the economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, and together they formed Hogarth Press, which published her work as well as many of the most important titles of the 20th century, including T. S. Eliot’s seminal long poem The Waste Land. Famously, Hogarth rejected James Joyce’s Ulysses—Woolf appreciated the book’s innovative style but found it too long and feared being sued for indecency. The Hogarth Press still exists today, proving the enduring power of the Woolfs’ approach to literature.

In 1915, Woolf published her first novel, The Voyage Out. She enjoyed literary celebrity during her lifetime, publishing ground-breaking novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928) as well as several works of nonfiction. Woolf’s themes were criticisms and reflections of her time, and as she was herself a feminist, her novels are influenced by feminist ideals. Woolf also had romantic relationships with women, which influenced many of her literary works. Woolf exhibited signs of mental illness throughout her life and died by suicide in 1941 after many years of institutionalization and attempted suicides.

The Voyage Out, Woolf’s first novel, introduces the feminist critiques she develops throughout her literary career. Characters like Helen Ambrose and Evelyn are early models of empowered women that Woolf features in later novels. Woolf is realistic about feminism, portraying how powerful women are repeatedly forced into boxes by their patriarchal society. She is also compassionate to characters who are not feminists because of the influence of their society. For example, Clarissa Dalloway, introduced in the first chapters of The Voyage Out, is the central protagonist of Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf doesn’t shy away from continuing her portrayal of Clarissa as a woman who has internalized misogynistic attitudes about her capacity as a woman. But underneath her conservative mask, Clarissa struggles with progress, feeling lost, attractions to women, and a recognition that she is capable of more than throwing parties for her husband’s network of important London connections.

Virginia Woolf is lauded not just for the topics she explored but for her prose and for the innovative structure of her novels. Along with James Joyce, she is credited with developing the narrative mode known as stream of consciousness, in which the language on the page attempts to mimic the flow of a character’s thoughts. The Voyage Out is not written in the stream-of-consciousness style that Woolf would develop in later novels like Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves, but the third-person limited point of view is used in this novel to reveal different nuances of a host of characters, even though Rachel is arguably the central protagonist. Modernist literature broke with classical forms of literary structure and language and introduced new ways of using the novel as a reflection of human psychology.

Virginia Woolf’s influence on the novel as we know it today is important. She experimented with prose and structure to develop a new technique in which literary narratives were an immersive experience.