The Voyage Out Read Free Page B

than to dabble in things I frankly don’t understand in the least. That is the kind of blunder—in literature—which seems tome ghastly & unpardonable: people, I mean, who wallow in emotions without understanding them. 3
    On publication,
The Voyage Out
was well received. A critic at the
Observer
wrote that it was “done with something startlingly like genius … among ordinary novels it is a wild swan among good grey geese.” 4 E. M. Forster wrote, “Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as
Wuthering Heights
, though by a different path, a book which, while written by a woman and presumably from a woman’s point of view, soars straight out of local questionings into the intellectual day.” 5 Still, Woolf was never fully satisfied with
The Voyage Out.
For the American edition, published by George H. Duran in 1920, she not only corrected typographical errors in the Duckworth edition but excised a number of sections, most of which she subsequently reinstated when
The Voyage Out
was included in the 1929 Uniform Edition of her novels, published by the Hogarth Press. That version is the one presented here.
    Shortly after
The Voyage Out
first appeared in 1915, she and Leonard bought the printing press that would eventually lead to the forming of the Hogarth Press. Following the appearance of her second novel,
Night and Day
, which was also published by Duckworth & Co., Woolf would for the rest of her writing life publish herself, and it is not coincidence that she then began producing her truly experimental work, the stories “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens,” among others, and the novel
Jacob’s Room.
That is when she discovered, “all in a flash, as if flying,” a free-form, organic approach to fiction that, she wrote, “… showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it.…” 6 She had become, she said, “the only woman in England free to write what I like.” 7
    If she felt her freedom restricted when she wrote
The Voyage Out
, she managed nevertheless to abundantly demonstrate early versions of the gifts she took to transcendent extremes in her later work. Woolf was then and remains today unparalleled in her ability to convey the sensations and complexities of the experience known as being alive. Any number of writers manage the big moments beautifully; few do as much with what it feels like to live through an ordinary hour on a usual day. As she said when speaking to a reading group, “In the course of your daily life this week … you have overheard scraps of talk that filled you with amazement. You have gone to bed at night bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In one day thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder.” 8 She was revolutionary in her shunning of the outwardly dramatic (most famously when she dispatched Mrs. Ramsay in a single sentence in
To the Lighthouse)
, and her insistence on the inwardly dramatic—her implied conviction that what’s important in a life, what remains at its end, is less likely to be its supposed climaxes than its unexpected moments of awareness, often arising out of unremarkable experience, so deeply personal they can rarely be explained.
    If this belief seems only slightly unusual today it was almost scandalous early in the century, when serious writers were expected to write about large and “serious” subjects. The generation of writers that immediately preceded Woolf—prominent Edwardians like Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells—tended to scorn the younger Georgians—like Woolf, Joyce, and T. S. Eliot—for what they considered inadequate attention to the histories and circumstances of their characters and for a more general lack of mythic scope and scale; a lack of “greatness,” if you will. Woolf countered by insisting that everything one needed to know about human life was