Reading Order
The Voyage OutVirginia Woolf The Voyage Out Reading Order
Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out (1915) is her debut novel — the story of Rachel Vinrace, a young English woman who accompanies her aunt and uncle on a voyage to South America and dies there of a fever shortly before her wedding. The most conventional of Woolf's novels in form, it is already concerned with all the themes she would develop across her career: the suppression of women's inner lives, the gap between social convention and private experience, the strangeness of English colonial culture. The essential starting point for understanding Woolf's development.
Where to start
The Voyage Out
Complete The Voyage Out Book List
- 1Buy
The Voyage Out
Virginia Woolf·1915·The novel itself — Rachel Vinrace, her voyage to South America, Terence Hewet, the fever; Woolf's debut and her most conventionally Victorian novel. - 2Buy
Night and Day
Virginia Woolf·1919·Woolf's second novel and the most direct sequel in her development — Katharine Hilbery, her mathematician aspirations, and the question of marriage in Edwardian London; more comedic than The Voyage Out but equally interested in the inner lives of women trapped by social convention. - 3Buy
Jacob's Room
Virginia Woolf·1922·The first of Woolf's fully experimental novels — the departure from the relative conventionality of The Voyage Out and Night and Day; the comparison shows how dramatically Woolf's method changed between 1919 and 1922. - 4Buy
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf·1925·The essential next step — Woolf's stream-of-consciousness masterpiece, and the novel that most fully develops the interests of The Voyage Out in a radically new form; Clarissa Dalloway's single day in London is the mature expression of what The Voyage Out approached in a Victorian framework. - 5Buy
The Years
Virginia Woolf·1937·Woolf's longest novel — the Pargiter family from 1880 to the 1930s; the return to a more conventional, multi-generational narrative and the companion to The Voyage Out in showing the range of Woolf's formal possibilities. - 6Buy
The Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy·1878·The essential Victorian predecessor — Hardy's portrait of Eustacia Vye, who is destroyed by the mismatch between her inner life and the social forms available to her; the tradition Woolf was working within and against when she wrote The Voyage Out. - 7Buy
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf·1929·Woolf's extended essay on women and fiction — the non-fiction companion to the question Rachel Vinrace's death raises: what would it mean for a woman to have both the room and the time to develop her own creative life?
The Voyage Out — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out about?
The Voyage Out follows Rachel Vinrace, a young English woman sheltered from the world, on a voyage to South America with her aunt and uncle. In Santa Marina, she meets Terence Hewet, they fall in love, and she dies of a fever shortly before their planned wedding. The novel is concerned with the suppression of women's inner lives by social convention and with the strangeness of English colonial culture abroad.
Is The Voyage Out Virginia Woolf's best novel?
The Voyage Out is generally considered Woolf's apprentice work rather than her masterpiece — the novel she had to write to find her method. Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves are where she fully realized her formal ambitions. The Voyage Out is essential for Woolf scholars and for readers interested in her development, but new readers are better served by starting with Mrs Dalloway.
What year did Virginia Woolf publish her first novel?
Virginia Woolf published The Voyage Out in 1915. She had been writing and revising the novel — under various working titles including Melymbrosia — for nearly nine years before publication. The delay was partly due to her mental health crises and partly due to her perfectionism about the novel's form.
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