The Voyage Out (Collins Classics)

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In particular, perspective and distance play a great role in the representation of character and mind throughout the novel. As Rachel’s ship moves away towards South America, the passengers take a far different view of England and the urban life than when they were in its midst: “Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a small island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned” (32). Distance gives a new perspective; we can see the destabilizing tendencies of modernism – its questioning of Europe as the essential center of world culture, its interest in how a certain angle of vision shapes subjectivity – begin to appear. Similarly, while thinking in South America of the Cambridge intellectuals that he oftentimes finds so spiritually desiccated and loathsome, Hirst thinks, “Far away on the other side of the world as they were, in smoky rooms, and grey medieval courts, they appeared remarkable figures, free-spoken men with whom one could be at ease; incomparably more subtle in emotion than the people here” (208). Hirst’s fellow scholars can be admired only at a remove: it is precisely because their image is smoky, grey, unclear, that they appear clever, sophisticated, delightful. As Lily Briscoe later thinks in To The Lighthouse, “So much depends…upon distance.” [4] Woolf realized the perspectival nature of reality even within her comparatively conservative first effort. 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."

Chapter XVIII. Hewet realises that he is in love with Rachel, but he is in doubt about the idea of marriage. He wonders what her feelings are and cannot make up his mind about what to do.EBook Plurilingua Publishing 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.

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 535. Like many other Woolf readers, I came late to The Voyage Out, having already delighted in her better-known works such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves. But as Gillian Beer says, this novel holds its own and deserves celebration. It marks the first steps of a great writer into the twentieth-century literary world; the arrival of someone who would become a towering presence in English writing. Woolf was at the centre of the revolution in the novel form during the time of modernism. The evidence is there in her annotated copy of The Voyage Out. This is a story about a young English woman, Rachel, on a sea voyage from London, to a South American coastal city of Santa Marina. As I read the story, the title of the story became a metaphor for Rachel's inner journey. When Clarissa Dalloway exclaims: "How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!" that resonates with our time's craving for interesting crime rather than virtuous mediocrity. But it also shows the strange carelessness which is a prelude to the highly unnecessary Great War. The novel was begun in 1907, at the time when Picasso experimented with the break-up of the traditional correspondence between colour and form and object, most notably evident in "The Demoiselles D'Avignon". This development towards a new interpretation of the world is very much visible in "The Voyage Out" as well, where many facets, colours and ideas are brought together in a painting of a society in a state of change.Virginia Woolf began her first novel sometime during the summer of 1906 or the fall of 1907, and did not finish it until nearly nine years later in the first year of World War I on March 26, 1915. [1] Originally entitled “Melymbrosia,” the work underwent a number of technical and thematic changes during its long gestation, as Woolf pruned away autobiographical parallels and struggled to find a voice and style that would balance social critique and a nuanced portrayal of the vicissitudes of consciousness.