The Voyage Out - Paperback

by Virginia Woolf (Author), Elisa Gabbert (Introduction by)

A young woman learns about life, and love found and lost, in this thought-provoking debut novel by one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and prolific writers--with an introduction by Elisa Gabbert, author of The Unreality of Memory

Front Jacket

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 shortessay 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."

Author Biography

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a novelist, critic, and essayist whose feminist and modernist concerns changed the course of twentieth-century literature. With her husband, Leonard Woolf, she co-founded the Hogarth Press, which published the early works of Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Sigmund Freud. Woolf devoted much of her creative energy to forging new forms in fiction, criticism, and biography. She is perhaps best remembered for her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway and its pioneering stream-of-consciousness narration.