The Voyage Out [Hardcover]

Virginia Woolf (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: The Hogarth Press; Sixth Impression edition (1949)
• ASIN: B0026BWRA2
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,759,526 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like Jane Austen "Tripped Out", August 30, 2008

By 

Laura - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Voyage Out (Girlebooks Classics) (Kindle Edition)

First published in 1915, The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf's first novel. It begins as Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose embark on a sea voyage for South America. Throughout their voyage and once they reach land there are many characters that float in and out of the text. Indeed, one is not sure who the main characters are until halfway through the novel. Clarissa and Richard Dalloway, the main characters of Woolf's later novel Mrs. Dalloway, even make an appearance.

Once reaching land, Mrs. Ambrose along with her niece, Rachel, explore the environs and make friends with other tourists-notably with two young men, Hewet and Hirst. Here these four friends form several intertwining and interesting relationships that guide us through the rest of the story.

Woolf's style is striking in the almost exclusive use of dialog interspersed with short, vivid descriptions of the characters' inner thoughts. Through this innovative style she is able to communicate, among many other things, a candid and realistic portrayal of the act of falling in love and all emotions that come along with it-heartbreak and loss, desire and contentment, longing and questioning, quiet happiness and quiet despair.

Several interesting details in the novel will strike the modern reader, such as the almost total absence of interaction with the natives. Geographically, the location is supposed to be near the Amazon river system, but Woolf has imagined an Amazon where the natives speak a mix of Spanish and French, the mountains rise majestically out of the sea, and one lights the fire after dinner. While Woolf can easily be criticized for neglecting to research the technical details and for writing only about the upper classes and their manias, to dwell on these issues would be entirely beside the point. E. M. Forster put it best when he described The Voyage Out as "...a strange, tragic, inspired book whose scene is a South America not found on any map and reached by a boat which would not float on any sea, an America whose spiritual boundaries touch Xanadu and Atlantis." ('The Novels of Virginia Woolf', New Criterion, April 1926, 277.)

On a personal note, I'd like to say that my only previous experience with Woolf was reading Mrs. Dalloway for a class in college. Perhaps one must grow into reading Woolf, because I admit I remember almost nothing of this book except that it was boring and depressing. I picked up The Voyage Out expecting much of the same, but how wrong I was! This book is beautiful, one that you will remember long after you read it. I recommend it highly-but not too highly, as making your own discovery of its worth is part of the charm.

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A True Voyage Out, March 2, 2005

By 

Trilby "Jon" (Alpharetta, GA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Voyage Out (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)

This novel is not necessarily the best overall story that I have read in terms of style and content. The plot follows a simplistic, sequential pattern and the supposed climax is not as surprising as it is portrayed to be. Luckily, this is not the reason to read this novel. The Voyage Out is in no way the greatest novel ever written, but the ideas that it represents and the thought that it provokes on topics ranging from imperialism to gender roles in society to love among intellectuals is more than worth the read.

We first meet Rachel aboard her father's ship and from the first conversation we are privey to, it is obvious that she is not an ordinary woman. She in no way realistically approaches her proper place in London Society and of course it is through Woolf's feminist viewpoint that we discover how much more of a human being Rachel can become by not following those patterns. In fact, we are introduced to many women throughout the novel, all ranging in their places from aristocratic wife to single author to inexperienced flirt to old widow and all that is in between. Woolf never truly tells which she prefers, but the reader is given an in depth look into the advantages of each lifestyle.

The men on the other hand are portrayed most basically as heartless, unpitying, logical beings, or in other words, the common man of that time, the common educated man of the time that is. Though each man has his own story, it is only Hewet, the one man who in hindsight acts as a woman, who is able to win the heart of Rachel and in fairness, fall madly in love with also. It is also shown in the end of the novel how there is a certain strength in men, a strength that can be both good and bad. The reader is surprised how some of the men handle disaster while they are dissapointed with how others could be so uncaring.

The character sketches set forth in this book are nothing short of spectacular in everything they represent. I consider myself well read and it is this book that I would say most accurately portrays the idea of falling in love. It is not love at first sight, nor is it a burning passion that cannot be quenched. Instead, it is two ordinary, if not so unonrdianary, people who realize that their lives just might not be the same without each other in it. There are no fireworks, there need be none and as the book is being read, a strange joy begins to creep up inside of one. Then again, all joy is not meant to last forever and I must admit that the lasting impressions is one of depression, not joy. This is not necessarily a bad thing though. Somehow, Woolf is able to show us through a seemingly random cast of 19th century characters that the world today has perhaps not changed as much as we would like to believe and it is that timelessness that makes this novel more than worth the small time it takes to read it

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Hideous unedited OCR garbage, January 22, 2010

By 

Antony W. Serio (Watertown NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The voyage out (Paperback)

This review is for the General Books LLC edition of this book, and is not a critique of Virginia Woolf herself or her writing style. My neighbor made the mistake of purchasing this book on Amazon, actually thinking that it would be readable. It was not. From the looks of things, the contents of this edition were taken from an OCR scan, and just dumped on the page willy-nilly by a high speed book printer. There was not even the slightest attempt to edit the contents of this edition. No spellcheck was completed, and I doubt if anybody even looked at the contents of this edition before it was sold. I was unable to read even a few paragraphs without being forced to parse out garbage characters, odd paragraph breaks, obvious errors, and missing punctuation. In a few cases, entire sentences are illegible.

In fact, there is a disclaimer opposite the Table Of Contents which claims:

"Limit of liability, disclaimer of warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose." It sounds as if the publisher knows that their edition is unedited garbage.

"No warranty may be created ore extended by sales representatives or written sales materials." Note that there is a typo in the disclaimer. Does the publisher even have employees that speak English?

"We have recreated this book from the original using Optical Character Recognition software to keep the cost of the book as low as possible. Therefore, could you please forgive any spelling mistakes, missing or extraneous characters that may have resulted from worn or smudged pages? When in doubt, please consult the original scanned book which may be available from our website." Think about it. If you had the chance to read this disclaimer before purchasing this book, would you actually pay money for it?

I've dealt with raw OCR scans before, and it does take quite a bit of editing to clean them up enough to be legible. A simple spell-check would have found most of these errors. Given the raw data and PDFs of the scans, I could probably do it myself in a day or so. The problem is that this publisher didn't even make an effort to do so. In fact, I doubt if they even have one editor on their staff. The fact that they have typos in their legal boilerplate is probably proof of that theory.

I think the publisher is doing a serious disservice to Virginia Woolf, Amazon's customers, and Amazon.com itself by attempting to market this book as anything but kindling. It is a waste of paper, ink, money, and time.