The Voyage Out

Rachel Vinrace, twenty-four, sheltered and musical, sails from London to South America on her father's ship with her aunt Helen Ambrose, who decides to take charge of her education. At a hotel in a small resort, among a group of English tourists, Rachel meets Terence Hewet, a young man who wants to write a novel about silence, and on a river journey into the jungle she begins to discover love and her own mind.

Published in 1915 after years of rewriting, this was Virginia Woolf's first novel, more traditional in form than her later books but already full of her questions about women's freedom and inner life. Richard and Clarissa Dalloway appear briefly on the ship, ten years before Mrs Dalloway. See her life.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was the daughter of the critic Leslie Stephen and grew up in a London house full of books. With her sister and friends she formed the circle of artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group, and with her husband Leonard she founded the Hogarth Press, which published her own books and those of T. S. Eliot.

Her novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando changed the way fiction follows the mind, and her essay A Room of One's Own argued that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write. She suffered all her life from depression, and drowned herself in 1941.