Reviews - The Voyage Out | The StoryGraph

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369 reviews for:

The Voyage Out

Virginia Woolf

3.65 AVERAGE

muchturnedpages's review against another edition

3.75

emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

aamccartan's review against another edition

4.0

Apparently everyone hates on the Voyage Out because it was Woolf's first novel and it isn't as abstract as her later works....but I really liked it! An interesting approach to a lot of different, early 20th century women's issues.

dessa's review against another edition

2.0

“It’s a shame she can’t live... but then again, who does?”

Just kidding, that’s the last line from Blade Runner. But it seems to be what this book is getting at. Which wouldn’t be so terrible if it didn’t take its sweet time about it. As is, it reads a little like Woolf got bored with her own novel and killed the protagonist off for her own pleasure. I have to say I approve.

I’d tag this for spoilers but if you haven’t read it in the last sixty years I think that’s probably your own fault.

rebeccaasavage's review against another edition

3.0

1. I do not like it when everyone else has to be contemptible in order for the main character to be interesting.
2. I’m tired of interesting female characters being killed off because the world didn’t know how to allow them lives that match their character.
3. Virginia Woolf has an irritating habit of naming perfectly things I didn’t know I wanted named in the midst of writing in a style I don’t love. It makes me keep reading because I feel seen even as I am otherwise discomfited.
4. Because I’ve been reading George Eliot so much Virginia’s style of gender commentary felt ham-fisted and obvious by comparison.

raegan01's review against another edition

3.0

challenging dark emotional reflective relaxing slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

travelling_bookworm's review against another edition

3.5

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

“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.”
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Virginia Woolf novels all have the same effect on me. They are simultaneously captivating and suffocating, diving deep into the consciousness of her characters rather than the flow of the actual plot. The result is a beautifully written but strange warp of sickeningly fast inner dialogue and emotions churning in a snail-paced story.
It is always a big effort for me to get through a Woolf novel, but by the end, I have never come to regret it yet.

benedettal's review against another edition

3.5

There’s something about Virginia Woolf. I really like what she writes, her principles, her ideas, her reflections. But the novels are so hard to read. Maybe it just found me at the wrong time, but I couldn’t fully appreciate this book until the end. Just difficult, but still beautiful.