Recommendations
Books Like The Voyage Out
Best books to read after The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
The Voyage Out is Woolf's debut — Rachel Vinrace's voyage to South America and death there of a fever, the most Victorian of Woolf's novels in form but already concerned with all her central themes. If the novel's portrait of a young woman's suppressed inner life and its meditation on what is lost when she dies moved you, these books share its concern with women's lives constrained by social convention, its engagement with the English abroad, and its place in the tradition of the Victorian novel that Woolf was working both within and against.
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Mrs Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
The essential companion — the fully developed Woolf, showing what The Voyage Out's themes become when she has found her formal method; Clarissa Dalloway's single day in London is the mature expression of the same concern with women's suppressed inner lives that Rachel Vinrace embodies in her more conventional Victorian setting
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Night and Day
by Virginia Woolf
The immediate successor — Woolf's second novel, more comedic than The Voyage Out but equally conventional in form; the essential companion in understanding Woolf's early period before she departed into full experimental fiction with Jacob's Room
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A Room of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's extended essay on women and fiction is the non-fiction companion to The Voyage Out's central question: what would it mean for a woman to have both the room and the time to develop her own creative life? Rachel dies before she can answer; Woolf argues in 'A Room' that the answer requires material conditions that women have been systematically denied
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Daniel Deronda
by George Eliot
Eliot's final novel — Gwendolen Harleth's marriage and eventual liberation — is the most direct Victorian predecessor to The Voyage Out in its portrait of a young woman whose intelligence and will are constrained by the social forms available to women; the tradition Woolf was working within and against
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The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
Eliot's most autobiographical novel — Maggie Tulliver, who is too large for the provincial world she inhabits and dies by drowning in its final pages; the Victorian predecessor that most directly anticipates Rachel Vinrace's fate and the question The Voyage Out raises about what happens to women whose inner lives exceed what their world can accommodate
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Howards End
by E.M. Forster
Forster's masterpiece about the connections between the intellectual Schlegel sisters and the philistine Wilcoxes — the most important contemporary Edwardian novel on the same themes as The Voyage Out; 'Only connect' is the answer The Voyage Out's Rachel Vinrace never gets to try
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A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
Forster's novel about the collision of English and Indian cultures in the colonial setting — the companion to The Voyage Out's portrait of the English abroad; both novels are organized around an event that may or may not have happened in a natural setting (the Marabar Caves, the South American landscape) that the English characters cannot read
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The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's novel about Eustacia Vye — the woman who is too large for Egdon Heath and is destroyed by the mismatch — is the essential Victorian predecessor in the tradition of fiction about women whose inner lives exceed what their world can accommodate; the companion to George Eliot in the tradition The Voyage Out emerges from
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