The Voyage Out (Penguin Modern Classics)

After a sheltered girlhood with her "small, rather pale" aunts at Richmond, Rachel Vinrace, voyaging out on her father's ship Euphorosyne, has her first "vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind."

At Santa Marina, dhe is welcomed into the privileged English circle which her father hopes she will adorn on their return to London - but she is repelled by its sterile complacency. Even the love and happiness she finds with Terence Hewett doesn't satisfy her completely, for "she wanted many more things than the love of one human being". Rachel's tragically sudden death underlines the hopelessness, and the beauty, of her romantic idealism.

The Voyage Out (1915), Virginia Woolf's first novel, explores some of the themes wich she handled more boldly in Jacob's Room and The waves, and it reveals, aldo, something of the satirical liveliness of Orlando. Lytton Strachey wrote of it: "I love... the secular sense of it all - 18th century in its absence of folly, but with the colour and amusement of modern life as well. Oh it's vary un-Victorian."

The cover shows a detail from "The Ende of the Chapter" by Wilson Steer, in the Bradford City Art Gallery.

Línguas Estrangeiras / Literatura Estrangeira