"Virginia Woolf was a great artist... she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly," wrote Katherine Anne Porter. Published in 1915, The Voyage Out, Woolf's first novel, clearly lays bare the poetic style that is the signature of her later fiction. Here she tells the story of Rachel Vinrace, a motherless young woman who embarks on a sea voyage to South America and falls in love with an aspiring writer. Theirs is a tale of doomed love, set against a chorus of other voices and other stories, as the narrative's focus shifts among its central and peripheral characters.