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The Voyage Out is the first novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1915 by Duckworth in the United Kingdom.
Woolf began work on The Voyage Out by 1910 (perhaps as early as 1907) and had finished an early draft by 1912. The novel had a long and difficult gestation; it was not published until 1915, as it was written during a period in which Woolf was psychologically vulnerable. She suffered from periods of depression and, at one point, attempted suicide. The resultant work contained the seeds of all that would blossom in her later work: the innovative narrative style, and the focus on feminine consciousness, sexuality, and death.
The novel introduces Clarissa Dalloway, the central character of Woolf's later novel, Mrs Dalloway. Two of the other characters were modelled after important figures in Woolf's life. St. John Hirst is a fictional portrayal of Lytton Strachey, and Helen Ambrose is, to some extent, inspired by Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell. Rachel's journey from a cloistered life in a London suburb to freedom, challenging intellectual discourse and self-discovery very likely reflects Woolf's own journey from a repressive household to the intellectual stimulation of the Bloomsbury Group. Toward the novel's end, Rachel Vinrace dies of a fever.
Writing in 1926, E. M. Forster described it as "... a strange, tragic, inspired book whose scene is a South America not found on any map and reached by a boat which would not float on any sea, an America whose spiritual boundaries touch Xanadu and Atlantis". Reviewing the book a decade earlier, he wrote this: "It is absolutely unafraid... Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path."
THE VOYAGE OUT
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