Virginia Woolf

Woolf originally began work on "The Voyage Out" in 1910 and had finished an early draft by 1912. Yet the novel had a long and difficult gestation and was not published until 1915. It was written during a period in which Woolf was especially 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, the focus on feminine consciousness, sexuality and death. Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

The Original 1915 Edition

THE VOYAGE OUT

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that was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.

clara

How little, after all, one can tell anybody about one's life! Here I sit, there you sit- both, I doubt not, chock-full of the most interesting experiences, ideas, emotions - yet how communicate? I've told you what every second person you meet might tell you." ,,I don't think so," she said. "It's the way of saying things, isn't it, not the things?"

Rooms, she knew, became more like worlds than rooms at the age of twenty-four.

If I were a woman I'd blow some one's brains out. Don't you laugh at us a great deal? Don't you think it all a great humbug? You, I mean-how does it all strike you?"

I've cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them' she said. 'I suppose I'm too fastidious. all my life I've wanted somebody I could look up to, somebody great and big and splendid. Most men are so small.'

'What do you mean by splendid?' Hewet asked. 'People are-nothing more.

to speak or to be silent was equally an effort, for when they were silent they were keenly conscious of each other's presence, and yet words were either too trivial or too large.

a slight but perceptible wave seemed to roll beneath the floor; then it sank; then another came, more perceptible. lights slid right across the uncurtained window. the ship gave a loud melancholy moan.

THE VOYAGE OUT quotes

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