The Voyage Out

Description

Virginia Woolf's first novel about a young woman's search for life, love and the world WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY FRANCES SPALDING AND ERICA WAGNER A party of English people board the Euphrosyne bound for South America. Among them is Rachel Vinrace, young, innocent and wholly ignorant of the world of politics and society. She is a free spirit, half-caught, momentarily and passionately, by Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer. But their engagement is to end abruptly, not in marriage but in tragedy. Published in 1915, The Voyage Out was Virginia Woolf's first novel.

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. From 1915, when she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary criticism, essays and biography. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917 they founded The Hogarth Press. Virginia Woolf suffered a series of mental breakdowns throughout her life, and on 28 March 1941 she committed suicide.

Done with something startling like genius - in its humour and its sense of irony, the occasional poignancy of its emotions, its profound originality * Observer * It is absolutely unafraid... Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path -- E. M. Forster