Rachel's mother has passed away many years ago. “The next few months passed away, as many years can pass away, without definite events, and yet, if suddenly disturbed, it would be seen that such months or years had a character unlike others.” The inner journey within this story is perhaps best summarized in the author's words: As I read the story, the title of the story became a metaphor for Rachel's inner journey. With the cleverness shown here, crudeĪs most of it is, there should be a possibility of something worth while from the same pen in the future.This is a story about a young English woman, Rachel, on a sea voyage from London, to a South American coastal city of Santa Marina. That fact is the most hopeful thing about it. 'The Voyage Out' is announced as the author’s first novel. So the story maunders on, and the fact that it is crowded with incident, most of it futile, and that the clever talk by every one continues in a confusingĬataract in every chapter, does not save it from becoming extremely tedious.

To be brought up as her father would wish-that is, a proper kind of English young lady. Dalloway to kiss her and confesses that she rather likes the sensation. Which might be presumed to injure the mind of a 'young person.' So it is not strange that one night she permits Mr. Rachel has been kept by her father in ignorance of everything These people all talk smartly, and one rather wonders what it is all about, for it does not seem to get anywhere in particular.

Pepper, wealthy and eccentric, with a leaning to abstruse learning, and a middle-aged, philandering member of ParliamentĪnd his wife, Clarissa, whom they pick up at Lisbon. On the ship are Willoughby’s daughter, 24 years old, Rachel, a Mr. Ridley Ambrose, a professor, and his wife, Helen, a woman of the smart London world, are going to the antipodes on a vessel owned by Helen’s brother-in-law, One after going through a hundred pages of it-there is little in this offering to make it stand out from the ruck of mediocre novels which make far less literary pretension.Īs for the story itself, it is painfully lacking, both in coherency and narrative interest. But aside from a certain cleverness-which, being all in one key, palls on

In its most interesting aspects-those in which members of Parliament and their coterie of relatives and friends are the active figures-there can be no doubt. His English novel, by an English writer, gives promise in its opening chapters of much entertainment.

The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf