Book description
With introductions by Frances Spalding and Erica Wagner
The Voyage Out opens with a party of English people 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. She is a free spirit, half-caught, momentarily
and passionately, by Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer met in Santa
Marina. 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.
