Review of The Voyage Out in the New York Times (1920)Ī review of The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf, originally published in the New York Times, June 1920: This English novel, by an English writer, gives promise in its opening chapters of much entertainment. While it’s not considered Virginia Woolf’s greatest effort, literary history has nonetheless proven this reviewer wrong. “It is absolutely unafraid… Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path.” Other reviewers were not so kind the 1920 review in the New York Times, following, was largely negative, using the words “futile,” “tedious,” and “confusing” to describe the book. The Voyage Out was unlike anything else that had been published, and so critical reception was mixed. Dalloway, one of Woolf’s most popular and accessible novels. We first meet Clarissa Dalloway, who readers will encounter later in Mrs. Rachel’s shipmates allow Woolf an opportunity to satirize British society in the Edwardian era. The plot, such as it is, centers on Rachel Vinrace, who voyages to South America on her father’s ship in a quest for self-discovery. Later, Louise de Salvo, a Woolf scholar reconstructed the novel from earlier drafts and released it as M elymbrosia(Woolf’s original title) in 1981. The final work was over-edited her publisher felt that her commentary on British politics was too pointed and that it could nip her career in the bud.

Nevertheless, it showed all the promise of her later work that would include stream of consciousness writing and themes of sexuality and death. Written at a point when Woolf was suffering from an acute period of mental illness during which there was a suicide attempt, the novel proceeded painfully slowly.

The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf was the first novel by this iconic English author, published in Britain in 1915 and in the U.S.

The voyage out by virginia woolf