The Voyage Out

Virginia Woolf (née Stephen)—the novelist, critic, and essayist whose feminist and modernist concerns changed the course of twentieth-century literature—was born in London on January 25, 1882. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was an eminent Victorian historian and biographer who oversaw his daughter’s education. “To read what one liked because one liked it, never to pretend to admire what one did not—that was his only lesson in the art of reading,” she recalled. “To write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one meant—that was his only lesson in the art of writing. All the rest must be learnt for oneself.” She experienced a traumatic adolescence following the deaths of her mother and stepsister, and suffered mental breakdowns the rest of her life. After Sir Leslie’s death in 1904 she settled in the Bloomsbury district of London with her siblings—Vanessa, Thoby, and Adrian—and soon became a central figure in the Bloomsbury group, an intellectual circle that included writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and John Maynard Keynes. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, another member of the group, and in 1917 the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which published the early works of Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Sigmund
Freud. Over the next quarter century Woolf’s sensibilities all but dominated the world of English letters. Fearing another onset of mental illness, Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse, near her country home in Sussex, on March 28, 1941. “With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken,” reflected T. S. Eliot at the time. “She was the centre, not merely of an esoteric group, but of the literary life of London. Her position was due to a concurrence of qualities and circumstances which never happened before, and which I do not think will ever happen again.”

Woolf devoted much of her creative energy to forging new forms in fiction. She made a remarkable debut as a novelist with
The Voyage Out
(1915). Her second novel,
Night and Day
(1919), was a conventional love story that disappointed critics, but
Jacob’s Room
(1922), an impressionistic elegy to the lost heroes of World War I, marked a turning point in her career. (“A new type of fiction has swum into view,” noted E. M. Forster.) Woolf scored another triumph with
Mrs. Dalloway
(1925), a stream-of-consciousness novel often compared with James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, and secured her reputation as a major writer with
To the Lighthouse
(1927), which Eudora Welty deemed “a vision of reality … an instantaneous burst of coherence over chaos and the dark.” Her subsequent fiction includes
Orlando
(1928), the historical fantasy written for Vita Sackville-West;
The Waves
(1931), an extended prose poem generally considered to be her masterpiece;
The Years
(1937), a brilliant fantasia on the Proustian theme of Time; and
Between the Acts
(1941), a powerful evocation of English life in the months leading up to World War II. “The novel, of course, was never to be the same after the day she started work on it,” reflected Welty. “ ‘Breaking the mold’ she called the task she set herself. As novel succeeded novel she proceeded to break, in turn, each mold of her own.”

Though best remembered for her novels, Woolf also wrote nearly fifty short stories, many of which served as a testing ground for her longer fiction. The new kind of narrative forms she created in experimental sketches such as “Kew Gardens” (1919) and “The Mark on the Wall” (1919) paved the way for
Jacob’s Room
and other
innovative novels. Woolf’s first collection of short fiction,
Monday or Tuesday
, was published by the Hogarth Press in 1921. Her other compilations include
A Haunted House and Other Short Stories
(1944) and
Mrs. Dalloway’s Party
(1975). “[Her stories] seem as perfect, and as functional for all their beauty, as spider webs,” observed Welty. “The extreme beauty of her writing is due greatly to one fact, that the imprisonment of life in the word was as much a matter of the senses with Virginia Woolf as it was a concern of the intellect.”

A discerning and influential literary critic as well as a novelist, Woolf began contributing book reviews to the
Times Literary Supplement
in 1905. “Whether you are writing a review or a love letter, the great thing is to be confronted with a very vivid idea of your subject,” she once remarked. Woolf published but three volumes of criticism during her lifetime:
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown
(1924),
The Common Reader
(1925), and
The Second Common Reader
(1932). Following his wife’s death Leonard Woolf brought out several compilations of her essays and reviews, including
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
(1942),
The Moment and Other Essays
(1947),
The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays
(1950),
Granite and Rainbow
(1958), and
Collected Essays
(four volumes, 1967). In assessing Woolf’s critical acumen, Welty wrote: “That beautiful mind! That was the thing. Lucid, passionate, independent, acute, proudly and incessantly nourished, eccentric for honorable reasons, sensitive for every reason, it has marked us forever.”

The Woolf canon comprises several other notable works of non-fiction. Perhaps the most famous are her two feminist polemics,
A Room of One’s Own
(1930) and
Three Guineas
(1938). In addition she wrote two biographies:
Flush
(1933), a whimsical account of the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, and
Roger Fry
(1940), a tribute to the painter, art critic, and curator who became a kind of father figure to the Bloomsbury group.
A Writer’s Diary
, a volume culled by Leonard Woolf from his wife’s personal papers, was published posthumously in 1953. “I have never read any book that conveyed more truthfully what a writer’s life is like,” said W. H. Auden. The memoir
Moments of Being
(1976) contains her only autobiogaphical writing. Woolf’s voluminous correspondence was compiled
in
The Letters of Virginia Woolf
(six volumes, 1975–1980), and her extensive journals were amassed in
The Diary of Virginia Woolf
(four volumes, 1977–1982).

“Virginia Woolf was a great artist, one of the glories of our time, and she never published a line that was not worth reading,” judged Katherine Anne Porter. “The least of her novels would have made the reputation of a lesser writer, the least of her critical writings compare more than favorably with the best criticism of the past half-century.… She lived in the naturalness of her vocation. The world of the arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly. She was at home in that place as much as anyone ever was.” Forster concurred: “Virginia Woolf got through an immense amount of work, she gave acute pleasure in new ways, and pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness.”

The Voyage Out
, Virginia Woolf’s first novel, is, like every novel, a chronicle of its author’s attempts to learn how to write a novel. That may be more apparent in a first novel than it is in a fifth; but all novels, if they’re good, are by definition experiments, even if their structures and themes are traditional, just as novelists, if they’re good, spend their lives learning how to write novels, and die still trying.

Woolf spent nine years writing
The Voyage Out
, beginning when she was twenty-four years old. No subsequent book would take her half as long or go through so many drafts. After
The Voyage Out
she produced the more conventional
Night and Day
, which she wrote, in part, to demonstrate to herself and others that she could in fact write a conventional novel. Then she embarked upon a twenty-five-year roil of troubled fertility during which she produced
Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves
, and
Between the Acts
, among other books. To a greater extent than any novelist except Joyce, she invented the Modernist novel, a drastic departure from the traditional form, with its heroics and high emotions; its morality; its unwavering point of view; and its unambiguous beginning, middle, and end. The novel, in Woolf’s hands,
became prismatic, ambiguous, at least slightly chaotic, amoral, poetic, and concerned itself primarily with outwardly unremarkable people. It strove less to tell an uplifting tale and more to render life as lived, in its endless overlaps of the quotidian and the profound. Since Woolf’s time, novels in the traditional mode have continued to be written by the boxcar load, but the novel as an art form has never been the same.