The Voyage Out Read Free Page A

while Vanessa ran the household as best she could she, unlike Julia or Stella, refused to subjugate herself. She treated Leslie as her sworn enemy. She offered him only rudimentary sympathy, sat in grim silence as he raged and wept over her monthly presentations of the household finances. Virginia’s loyalties were divided, though in the end she always, inevitably, sided with Vanessa. In creating Helen and Ridley Ambrose, Virginia to some extent reimagined her parents’ marriage as if Leslie had been married to a woman more like Vanessa—a woman who refused to be crushed. Even in writing the Ambroses, though, she could only liberate Helen by rendering Ridley less and less physically present, until by the middle of the book he is virtually invisible. He essentially goes to his room to work, and never comes out again.
    When Leslie Stephen died of bowel cancer in 1904, after a long and dreadful struggle exacerbated by less-than-competent doctors, the Stephen children were set free. Although Virginia had loved Leslie to the best of her ability, she later wrote in her diary that, had he lived much longer, “His life would have entirely ended mine.” 2 Virginia and Vanessa, along with their brothers, Thoby and Adrian, left their father’s gloomy house at Hyde Park Gate, took their modest inheritance, and rented an inexpensive house in the then-disreputable neighborhood of Bloomsbury. Thoby, the older of the Stephen sons, began bringing around some of the people he’d met at Cambridge: Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Desmond MacCarthy, Lytton Strachey, and Leonard Woolf. The Bloomsbury group was launched.
    Not long after the move to Bloomsbury, however, the four Stephen children took a trip to Greece and Turkey, where first Vanessa and then Thoby fell ill. Upon returning to EnglandVanessa recovered but Thoby, whom Virginia adored, died, at least in part because his doctor spent ten days treating him for malaria before realizing that he in fact had typhoid fever.
    It was about that time that Virginia began writing
The Voyage Out
(which she called, in its early stages,
Melymbrosia)
, a novel in which a young woman whose mother has died goes on a journey to a strange place, begins her worldly education, worries about the perils of marriage but becomes engaged, catches a mysterious fever, is treated by a useless doctor, and dies before she can marry. During the years Woolf spent writing the book she rejected several proposals of marriage, including one from Lytton Strachey. She finally married Leonard, and suffered another breakdown—a terrible one—soon after her wedding. At Leonard’s urging the new couple set up house in Richmond, then a quiet suburb of London, where he hoped Virginia would be better able to remain calm and lucid.
    Writing
The Voyage Out
was a struggle for her—she not only doubted her gifts but felt she was already rather old to be working on a first novel—and from its initial conception to its finished state the book went through eight or nine drafts. Early in the effort she wrote to her friend Madge Vaughan:
    My only defense is that I write of things as I see them; & I am quite conscious all the time that it is a very narrow, & rather bloodless point of view. I think—if I were Mr. Gosse writing to Mrs. Green!—I could explain a little why this is so from external reasons, such as education, way of life, &. And so perhaps I may get something better as I grow older. George Eliot was near 40 I think, when she wrote her first novel, the Scenes [of Clerical Life].
    But my present feeling is that this vague & dream like world, without love, or heart, or passion, or sex, is the world I really care about, & find interesting. For, though they are dreams to you, & I can’t express them at all adequately, these things are perfectly real to me.
    But please don’t think for a moment that I am satisfied, or think that my view takes in any whole. Only it seems to me, better to write of the things I do feel,