The Voyage Out

A novel about a young woman learning about life, and of love found and lost, by of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and prolific writers

Rachel Vinrace 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.

Less formally experimental than Woolf's later novels, The Voyage Out 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.