The Voyage Out. Virginia Woolf
DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS
GENERAL EDITOR: SUSAN L. RATTINER
EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: JIM MILLER
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 by Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2020, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published in 1915 by Duckworth & Company, London. The Note and footnotes were first published in 2006.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941, author.
Title: The voyage out / Virginia Woolf.
Description: Mineola, N.Y. : Dover Publications, Inc., 2020. | Series: Dover thrift editions | “ . . . an unabridged republication of the work originally published in 1915 by Duckworth & Company, London. The Note and footnotes were first published in 2006”—Verso title page. | Summary: “This acclaimed work marked the debut of one of the 20th century’s most brilliant and important authors. Virginia Woolf’s captivating exploration of a young woman’s growing self-awareness parallels a shipboard journey to South America with an inner quest. An accessible introduction to Woolf’s writing, the book was acclaimed by E. M. Forster as “a strange, tragic, inspired novel . . . as poignant as anything in modern fiction.””— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019044007 | ISBN 9780486842363 (trade paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: British—South America—Fiction. | Women travelers—Fiction. | Ocean travel—Fiction. | Young women—Fiction. | GSAFD: Love stories. | Bildungsromans.
Classification: LCC PR6045.O72 V68 2020 | DDC 823/.912—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044007
Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications
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Note
VIRGINIA WOOLF, BORN Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882, was thrust headlong into the world of books. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a consummate man of letters—founder and editor of the massive Dictionary of National Biography, friend of writers such as George Meredith, Henry James, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot, and husband, in his first marriage, to Thackeray’s daughter Minny. After Minny’s death, he married a widow named Julia Duckworth, with whom he had four children in quick succession—Vanessa (1879), Thoby (1880), Virginia, and Adrian (1883). During Virginia’s childhood the household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, contained not only her brothers and sister but four half siblings as well: George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth, and Laura Makepeace Stephen, the mentally ill daughter Stephen had from his first marriage. It was a terrifically bookish environment. Visitors to the house were the cream of Victorian literary society, and the Stephens had an extensive library, which they used to educate their children. Vanessa trained to become a painter, and Virginia was set on becoming a writer, but they were taught at home while their two brothers went off to public schools and then to Cambridge.
Julia Stephen’s sudden death from influenza in 1895 led to the first of the series of mental breakdowns that would plague Virginia throughout her life. (Though a few scholars have attempted to lay the blame for her illness on definable traumas—such as the sexual abuse by her half brother George that began two years after her mother’s death—possibly her DNA was the real culprit; she appears to have been a victim of bipolar disorder.) Her beloved half sister Stella Duckworth (who had become something of a surrogate mother to her) died two years later. After her father’s death in 1904, Virginia had a severe collapse and was confined briefly to a nursing home, where she attempted suicide by throwing herself out a window.
Vanessa, meanwhile, arranged for the four siblings to move from their childhood home to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. Here Thoby initiated regular Thursday-evening gatherings for the coterie of bright young men he had come to know at Cambridge, including Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and John Maynard Keynes—the germ of what would become known as the Bloomsbury group. (The group also included David Garnett, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and E. M. Forster.) The gatherings continued even after Thoby’s death of typhoid in 1906 and Vanessa’s marriage to Clive Bell in 1907.
Virginia had begun writing professionally in 1905, mostly for the Times Literary Supplement (in that first year, she contributed thirty-five reviews and essays). In 1912, when she was close to finishing her first novel (called Melymbrosia before she changed the title to The Voyage Out), Leonard Woolf returned on leave from his colonial administrative job in Ceylon. They saw each other with new eyes and were married that August. He proved to be an exceedingly patient and nurturing husband. When Virginia had a severe mental breakdown the following year, he nursed her back to health. The Voyage Out had already been accepted for publication (by Duckworth, the company founded by her half brother Gerald), but it did not come out till 1915, when she had recovered. Duckworth also published her second novel (Night and Day, in 1919), but she and Leonard published most of her later work themselves at the Hogarth Press. The Hogarth Press began with a tabletop hand press that they bought in 1917, largely as therapy for Virginia. At first they did all the hand typesetting themselves. But the work expanded, and their little press eventually turned into a full-fledged publishing house, bringing out work not only by Leonard and Virginia but by Keynes, Forster, T. S. Eliot, Maxim Gorky, Katherine Mansfield, Sigmund Freud, Christopher Isherwood, and others.
The Voyage Out is a more conventional and easily readable novel than some of her later works. In the 1920s she did some of her best writing and—especially with Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931)—became known as an innovator, largely because of her use of stream-of-consciousness techniques to show the depths and subtleties of her characters’ thoughts and feelings. The 1930s were a less happy decade for the Woolfs, darkened by the deaths of friends and the prospect of war. In 1940 they were bombed out of their London flat and moved to their country home, Monks House, in Sussex. The following spring, as she neared the end of her final novel, Between the Acts, Woolf again began to be severely depressed, and was consumed by the idea that the book was worthless and unpublishable. Leonard, deeply worried, called in their local doctor. Virginia was not happy about seeing the doctor, and demanded assurance that she would not be put into a nursing home, but after the doctor left (Leonard recalled later) she seemed cheerful.
Two days later, on 28 March 1941, Virginia filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse. The suicide note she left for Leonard said
I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.1
That sort of love, that sort of happiness—what an extraordinary thing that is to contemplate. It is such a rarity in life and in marriage that