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A review by fionnualalirsdottir
The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
I’m sitting in front of my computer screen wondering which of several angles to choose in order to make this review something more than just another account of the plot and characters of [b:The Voyage Out (1915)|551482|The Voyage Out|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347361012s/551482.jpg|1412170].
My copy of the book is on the desk beside me and I’m sorting through the various passages I’ve underlined looking for the slant that will please me most. The following line describing leading character Helen Ambrose catches my eye: She had her embroidery frame set up on deck, with a little table by her side on which lay open a black volume of philosophy.
Helen Ambrose’s fictional existence is happening one hundred years before my real-life one but in some respects we aren’t very different. Like me, Helen is a middle-aged woman who reads a lot. Unlike me, Helen can’t share thoughts about books with the world via a computer screen; her book thoughts are kept within the confines of her mind while her creative urges are directed instead towards her embroidery screen. But Helen, as we soon find out, likes to do things differently, even when it comes to embroidery: she chose a thread from the vari-coloured tangle that lay in her lap, and sewed red into the bark of a tree, or yellow into a river torrent.
I’d like to think that Helen and I are a little alike in how we see the world; tree bark isn’t always brown nor rivers always blue, just as book reviews don’t always have to follow a standard format and limit themselves to summaries of the plot and lists of the characters.
If this book were a painting instead of a novel, it would be focused entirely on Helen so intrinsic to everything is her role in Woolf’s composition.
Embroidery Frame, Mary Cassatt
At times, and Helen’s embroidery is just one example, the themes, and the treatment of them, harken back to the nineteenth century. At other times, the thoughts and speeches which Woolf gives her characters, and Helen in particular, would not be out of place in a novel of the twenty-first century.
Woolf deliberately recalls nineteenth century novels to our attention, those of Jane Austin and Charlotte Brontë in particular; I’ve noted several examples in the updates. She even has the characters discuss Austen and Brontë at one point:
'Wuthering Heights! said Clarissa, 'Ah---that’s more in my line. I really couldn’t exist without the Brontës! Don’t you love them? Still, on the whole, I’d rather live without them than without Jane Austin.’
‘Jane Austin? I don’t like Jane Austin,’ said Rachel.
‘You monster!’ Clarissa explained. ‘I can only just forgive you. Tell me why?’
‘She’s so---so---well, so like a tight plait,’ Rachel floundered.
Rachel is Helen Ambrose’s twenty-something year-old niece and is herself a typical nineteenth century heroine: young, passionate, eager to fall in love, a Marianne Dashwood from Austen’s [b:Sense and Sensibility|14935|Sense and Sensibility|Jane Austen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1397245675s/14935.jpg|2809709], or, on a less passionate day, a Lucy Snowe from Brontë’s [b:Villette|31173|Villette|Charlotte Brontë|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320412741s/31173.jpg|40852693]. If this were an Austen novel, Rachel would be the central character and her meeting with the man she might marry would be the main event of the book.
But this is a Woolf novel, perched astride two centuries. It is Woolf’s first novel in fact, the idea for which she developed as early as 1905 when she herself was Rachel’s age but already seeing the world not as Rachel does but rather as the older, more free-spirited and less anchored-in-time character, Helen might. And, like Helen, Woolf looks forward in this book, not only towards the freedoms that women will gain in the twentieth century, but to her own novels yet to come. The Clarissa in the quote above is Clarissa Dalloway who will feature in Woolf’s fourth book, [b:Mrs. Dalloway|14942|Mrs. Dalloway|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1479336522s/14942.jpg|841320], alongside her husband Richard, mercifully given a more mute role in the later work than he has here. The other male characters in [b:The Voyage Out|148905|The Voyage Out|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328874751s/148905.jpg|1412170] are prototypes of Jacob Flanders from [b:Jacob's Room|225396|Jacob's Room|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388466257s/225396.jpg|3272732], and Neville, Louis and Bernard from [b:The Waves|46114|The Waves|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1439492320s/46114.jpg|6057263]. There is also an artist character in [b:The Voyage Out|148905|The Voyage Out|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328874751s/148905.jpg|1412170], a foreshadowing of Lily Briscoe in [b:To the Lighthouse|59716|To the Lighthouse|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1346239665s/59716.jpg|1323448]. There are even hints of the exoticism of [b:Orlando|18839|Orlando|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1443118010s/18839.jpg|6057225] to be found here.
So [b:The Voyage Out|148905|The Voyage Out|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328874751s/148905.jpg|1412170] is a one-way voyage in several senses; not only is it a one-way journey for the quasi-heroine Rachel, it is also a one-way trip away from the nineteenth century novel, outward bound towards what will become the twentieth-century novel as Woolf will very soon imagine it.
My copy of the book is on the desk beside me and I’m sorting through the various passages I’ve underlined looking for the slant that will please me most. The following line describing leading character Helen Ambrose catches my eye: She had her embroidery frame set up on deck, with a little table by her side on which lay open a black volume of philosophy.
Helen Ambrose’s fictional existence is happening one hundred years before my real-life one but in some respects we aren’t very different. Like me, Helen is a middle-aged woman who reads a lot. Unlike me, Helen can’t share thoughts about books with the world via a computer screen; her book thoughts are kept within the confines of her mind while her creative urges are directed instead towards her embroidery screen. But Helen, as we soon find out, likes to do things differently, even when it comes to embroidery: she chose a thread from the vari-coloured tangle that lay in her lap, and sewed red into the bark of a tree, or yellow into a river torrent.
I’d like to think that Helen and I are a little alike in how we see the world; tree bark isn’t always brown nor rivers always blue, just as book reviews don’t always have to follow a standard format and limit themselves to summaries of the plot and lists of the characters.
If this book were a painting instead of a novel, it would be focused entirely on Helen so intrinsic to everything is her role in Woolf’s composition.
Spoiler
Embroidery Frame, Mary CassattAt times, and Helen’s embroidery is just one example, the themes, and the treatment of them, harken back to the nineteenth century. At other times, the thoughts and speeches which Woolf gives her characters, and Helen in particular, would not be out of place in a novel of the twenty-first century.
Woolf deliberately recalls nineteenth century novels to our attention, those of Jane Austin and Charlotte Brontë in particular; I’ve noted several examples in the updates. She even has the characters discuss Austen and Brontë at one point:
'Wuthering Heights! said Clarissa, 'Ah---that’s more in my line. I really couldn’t exist without the Brontës! Don’t you love them? Still, on the whole, I’d rather live without them than without Jane Austin.’
‘Jane Austin? I don’t like Jane Austin,’ said Rachel.
‘You monster!’ Clarissa explained. ‘I can only just forgive you. Tell me why?’
‘She’s so---so---well, so like a tight plait,’ Rachel floundered.
Rachel is Helen Ambrose’s twenty-something year-old niece and is herself a typical nineteenth century heroine: young, passionate, eager to fall in love, a Marianne Dashwood from Austen’s [b:Sense and Sensibility|14935|Sense and Sensibility|Jane Austen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1397245675s/14935.jpg|2809709], or, on a less passionate day, a Lucy Snowe from Brontë’s [b:Villette|31173|Villette|Charlotte Brontë|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320412741s/31173.jpg|40852693]. If this were an Austen novel, Rachel would be the central character and her meeting with the man she might marry would be the main event of the book.
But this is a Woolf novel, perched astride two centuries. It is Woolf’s first novel in fact, the idea for which she developed as early as 1905 when she herself was Rachel’s age but already seeing the world not as Rachel does but rather as the older, more free-spirited and less anchored-in-time character, Helen might. And, like Helen, Woolf looks forward in this book, not only towards the freedoms that women will gain in the twentieth century, but to her own novels yet to come. The Clarissa in the quote above is Clarissa Dalloway who will feature in Woolf’s fourth book, [b:Mrs. Dalloway|14942|Mrs. Dalloway|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1479336522s/14942.jpg|841320], alongside her husband Richard, mercifully given a more mute role in the later work than he has here. The other male characters in [b:The Voyage Out|148905|The Voyage Out|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328874751s/148905.jpg|1412170] are prototypes of Jacob Flanders from [b:Jacob's Room|225396|Jacob's Room|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388466257s/225396.jpg|3272732], and Neville, Louis and Bernard from [b:The Waves|46114|The Waves|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1439492320s/46114.jpg|6057263]. There is also an artist character in [b:The Voyage Out|148905|The Voyage Out|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328874751s/148905.jpg|1412170], a foreshadowing of Lily Briscoe in [b:To the Lighthouse|59716|To the Lighthouse|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1346239665s/59716.jpg|1323448]. There are even hints of the exoticism of [b:Orlando|18839|Orlando|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1443118010s/18839.jpg|6057225] to be found here.
So [b:The Voyage Out|148905|The Voyage Out|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328874751s/148905.jpg|1412170] is a one-way voyage in several senses; not only is it a one-way journey for the quasi-heroine Rachel, it is also a one-way trip away from the nineteenth century novel, outward bound towards what will become the twentieth-century novel as Woolf will very soon imagine it.