Book description
A party of English people are aboard the Euphrosyne, bound for South
America. Among them is Rachel Vinrace, a young girl, innocent and wholly
ignorant of the world of politics and society, books, sex, love and
marriage. She is a free spirit half-caught, momentarily and
passionately, by Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer who she meets in
Santa Marina. But their engagement is to end abruptly, and tragically.
Virginia Woolf's first novel, published in 1915, is a haunting
exploration of a young woman's mind, signalling the beginning of her
fascination with capturing the mysteries and complexities of the inner
life.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is now recognized as a major
twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key
figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist.
Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then
worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly
experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her
fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied
experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the
relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and
history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not
only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of
feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).
Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy
Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily
poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years
(1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are published by
Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, and selections from her
essays and short stories.
