The Voyage Out

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.

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 only partly educated, 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.      

With hints of Jane Austen and Emily Brontë, The Voyage Out is a softer and more traditional novel than Virginia Woolf’s experimental work, even as it reflects the poetic style and innovative technique—with 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.