The Voyage Out (2 page)

Published in 1915, when Woolf had just turned thirty-three,
The Voyage Out
contains most of the elements of conventional narrative. It involves a love affair, an engagement, and a death; and it progresses, in orderly fashion, from its beginning through its middle to its end. But because it is a relatively familiar romance written by a great writer it defies convention to at least the same degree that it honors convention. Woolf believed (these are my words, not hers) that the meticulously structured, often inspirational novels of her time had about as much to do with the world and those who live in it as did a boat full of colonials and missionaries venturing into a jungle determined to subdue it. It was one of Woolf’s contributions to insist, in her fiction, that the world is too huge and mysterious, too impenetrably itself, for fiction as fiction is so often written; that any writer’s attempt to clear the field of its vines and creepers, to frighten off the hostile animals so as to set up a table for tea and begin to demonstrate a proper sense of right and wrong, is unlikely to come to a good or useful end. In her fiction Woolf bore witness to the world, saw and recorded some of its patterns, but did not attempt to enforce upon it any particular order or demand that it produce an order of its own. For this innovation she has often been accused of writing about nothing at all.

The Voyage Out
employs the oldest and most venerable of narrative devices, the journey. It specifically concerns the fate of Rachel Vinrace, whose vivacious and compelling mother died when she was eleven, leaving her to be raised by her chilly father and two spinster aunts. Rachel is, at twenty-four, almost pathologically unformed. She knows nothing whatever about sex, has had only a smattering of education, and is hard put to hold up her end in an ordinary conversation. She is, however, a relatively accomplished
pianist, and playing the piano is her one true passion. In her way she is the idealized Artist with a capital A—incompetent at and largely indifferent to everything except her art.

The novel begins with an ocean voyage on board a modest passenger steamer, the
Euphrosyne
(so named by Woolf as a private joke—it was the title of a collection of solemn poetry she considered ridiculous, published by her husband and some of her friends). The ship is sailing from England to South America, and then sailing up the Amazon. On board, Rachel is befriended—“adopted” might be more accurate—by her aunt, Helen Ambrose, a forceful, unsentimental woman in her early forties who is at least as central to the novel as Rachel. They disembark at Santa Marina, a village on the South American coast, take up residence in a haphazard villa with a neglected garden, and become involved with the denizens of the village’s only hotel, among them two young men: St. John Hirst, who bears a strong resemblance to Lytton Strachey and who falls in love with Helen, and Terence Hewet, an aspiring novelist, who argues many of Woolf’s own positions about writing and who falls in love with Rachel.

Ultimately, certain members of the group undertake a second voyage, up a river and into the jungle, and that is what changes everything.

The Voyage Out
tells the tale of its doomed lovers amid a chorus of other stories, other points of view. Rachel Vinrace and Terence Hewet are, variously, the central, galvanizing figures and peripheral characters who play, at best, a supporting role in the stories of Helen Ambrose, St. John Hirst, Susan Warrington, Miss Allan, and others. An essential element of Woolf’s genius, visible from the beginning of her career, is her insistence on a fictive world too large and complex to focus its exclusive attention on any individual life. Try to enter the consciousness of a person, any person, and you are led immediately to dozens of other people, each of whom is integral, each in a different way. Woolf understood that every character about whom she wrote, even the most marginal, was visiting her novel from a novel of his or her own, and that that other, unwritten novel had as its main concerns the passions and fate of
this character—this dowager or child or septuagenarian, this young woman who appears in the novel at hand only long enough to walk through a park. Although
The Voyage Out
is more orderly than most of the books Woolf went on to write, it is nevertheless bent out of traditional shape by these other, phantom novels (the one about the Ambrose family, the ones about St. John Hirst and Mrs. Thornbury and Evelyn Murgatroyd, not to mention Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, who appear briefly in
The Voyage Out
and will, of course, figure later in a book very much their own). They intrude on the story of Rachel and Terence out of necessity, not only because they are part of it but because they and Rachel and Terence are all part of a much larger story, a story too vast to tell.

Although the facts of Woolf’s life and death have tended to overshadow the appreciation of her work—she is too often thought of as a personality first and a writer second—her work and her life do in fact converge, particularly in this, her first novel. She insisted on writing only about people and states of feeling she knew well. She despised the Victorian penchant for elaborate invention, and so based most of her characters and situations, at least to some extent, on the people she knew and the things that had happened to her.

She was born Virginia Stephen in 1882, the third of four children. Her older sister, Vanessa, a complex and formidable person, a gifted painter, was arguably one of the three or four great loves of Virginia’s life and was certainly one of the models for Helen Ambrose. Virginia would always be drawn to charming, capable women—she especially admired social ease, which she felt she lacked entirely—and Helen Ambrose is the first in a long line of Woolf women, including Clarissa Dalloway in
Mrs. Dalloway
, Mrs. Ramsay in
To the Lighthouse
, Susan in
The Waves
, and Maggie Pargiter in
The Years
, whom she would base on various aspects of various living women. She would use Vanessa and their mother, Julia; she would draw on her friendships with London society women like Kitty Maxse and Violet Dickinson, and, later, on her more volatile relationships with Vita Sackville-West and Ethel Smyth.

Like Helen Ambrose and Rachel Vinrace, like most of the characters
Woolf would create throughout her career, the Stephen children grew up among the lower ranks of the upper classes. That meant, in late Victorian England, that the Stephens inhabited a large house, had servants, and took holidays, but kept a close eye on accounts. They sent their sons to college but not their daughters; and while college for women was unusual at the time, it was not unknown. The decision to send only the boys to college was, finally, an economic one, made in spite of the fact that of the Stephen children Virginia was clearly the most gifted and the most intellectually curious. By way of compensation Virginia’s father, Leslie, insisted that he could give her a perfectly adequate education at home.

Leslie Stephen was nothing so simple as a villain, but by all known accounts the word “difficult” would be a generous description of him as husband and father. A prominent historian and biographer (he would probably be both proud and horrified to learn that, almost a century after his death, he is primarily known as Virginia’s father), he believed himself to be a genius, worried that he was not a genius, and laid claim to all the privileges to which genius at its most romantic may consider itself entitled. He suffered noisy, melodramatic agonies (over his work, over household finances); he threw tantrums; he required extravagant amounts of attention, sympathy, and reassurance and, receiving them, often demanded more. His determination not to suffer fools gladly, or at all, could terminate a dinner party; and his idea of an ideal evening’s entertainment often involved all present sitting silent as he read aloud.

At the same time he did in fact attend carefully to young Virginia’s education, gave her excellent books to read, took genuine pleasure in her precocity. She recognized his failings but loved him, and she and Vanessa argued the subject of his selfishness versus his goodness all their lives.

He was first married to one of Thackeray’s daughters, with whom he had a “backward” (possibly autistic) daughter named Laura, and after his first wife died he married Julia Duckworth, a widow with three children of her own, one of them a son named
Gerald, who would sexually molest Virginia when she was six and would, over two decades later, publish
The Voyage Out
under the imprimatur of his publishing company, Duckworth & Co.

Julia, Virginia’s mother, was a woman of great beauty and magnetism, the willing handmaiden to Leslie’s tyrannical fragility, and while Julia and Leslie Stephen are most directly portrayed as Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay in
To the Lighthouse
, traces of one or both of them appear throughout Woolf’s fiction. Helen Ambrose’s husband, Ridley, is a version of Leslie, similarly self-absorbed but far less demanding; and some aspects of Virginia’s complicated feelings about Julia—rage and romance prominent among them—may have informed the invention of Clarissa Dalloway, that shimmering vision of aloof sophistication who appears, enchants, and vanishes.

When Virginia was thirteen Julia died of rheumatic fever and, more ambiguously, of the incessant strain that accrued from having been married to Leslie. She was just forty-nine. The day after Julia’s death, when Virginia was taken in to see the body, she believed she saw a man sitting on the edge of her deceased mother’s bed. Although she recorded no details about the hallucination (she was half convinced she’d simply pretended to hallucinate, to draw attention to herself) one thinks of Rachel’s dream in
The Voyage Out
, in which she finds herself “… alone with a little deformed man who squatted on the floor gibbering, with long nails. His face was pitted and like the face of an animal.”

After her mother’s death Virginia suffered the first of the breakdowns that would plague her the rest of her life. She became so anxious that for months she was not allowed to read or study, and was kept to the simplest possible regimen of rest, regular meals, and short walks. She often became hysterical and paranoid; as she would write years later in the notes for her essay “A Sketch of the Past,” “I was terrified of people—used to turn red if spoken to.”
¹

After Julia Stephen died her place was taken by Stella, Julia’s daughter from her previous marriage. Stella consoled Leslie in his transports of grief and guilt. She managed the Stephen household.
When she married, Leslie proposed that she and her new husband live in the Stephen house; the young couple managed to mollify him by moving into a house several doors down. Within two years of Julia’s death, Stella died herself.

Leslie then turned to eighteen-year-old Vanessa to be his new helpmate, and while Vanessa ran the household as best she could she, unlike Julia or Stella, refused to subjugate herself. She treated Leslie as her sworn enemy. She offered him only rudimentary sympathy, sat in grim silence as he raged and wept over her monthly presentations of the household finances. Virginia’s loyalties were divided, though in the end she always, inevitably, sided with Vanessa. In creating Helen and Ridley Ambrose, Virginia to some extent reimagined her parents’ marriage as if Leslie had been married to a woman more like Vanessa—a woman who refused to be crushed. Even in writing the Ambroses, though, she could only liberate Helen by rendering Ridley less and less physically present, until by the middle of the book he is virtually invisible. He essentially goes to his room to work, and never comes out again.

When Leslie Stephen died of bowel cancer in 1904, after a long and dreadful struggle exacerbated by less-than-competent doctors, the Stephen children were set free. Although Virginia had loved Leslie to the best of her ability, she later wrote in her diary that, had he lived much longer, “His life would have entirely ended mine.”
²
Virginia and Vanessa, along with their brothers, Thoby and Adrian, left their father’s gloomy house at Hyde Park Gate, took their modest inheritance, and rented an inexpensive house in the then-disreputable neighborhood of Bloomsbury. Thoby, the older of the Stephen sons, began bringing around some of the people he’d met at Cambridge: Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Desmond MacCarthy, Lytton Strachey, and Leonard Woolf. The Bloomsbury group was launched.

Not long after the move to Bloomsbury, however, the four Stephen children took a trip to Greece and Turkey, where first Vanessa and then Thoby fell ill. Upon returning to England
Vanessa recovered but Thoby, whom Virginia adored, died, at least in part because his doctor spent ten days treating him for malaria before realizing that he in fact had typhoid fever.

It was about that time that Virginia began writing
The Voyage Out
(which she called, in its early stages,
Melymbrosia)
, a novel in which a young woman whose mother has died goes on a journey to a strange place, begins her worldly education, worries about the perils of marriage but becomes engaged, catches a mysterious fever, is treated by a useless doctor, and dies before she can marry. During the years Woolf spent writing the book she rejected several proposals of marriage, including one from Lytton Strachey. She finally married Leonard, and suffered another breakdown—a terrible one—soon after her wedding. At Leonard’s urging the new couple set up house in Richmond, then a quiet suburb of London, where he hoped Virginia would be better able to remain calm and lucid.

Writing
The Voyage Out
was a struggle for her—she not only doubted her gifts but felt she was already rather old to be working on a first novel—and from its initial conception to its finished state the book went through eight or nine drafts. Early in the effort she wrote to her friend Madge Vaughan: