WORKS

 

 

 

 

           Published in 1915, The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf's first novel. It tells the story of the coming-of-age of a young woman, Rachel Vinrace, who accompanies her aunt and uncle, Helen and Ridley Ambrose, on a voyage to South America, on the Euphrosyne, Mr. Ambrose's ship. Rachel has lived a sheltered life in England and though she is a talented musician she knows little of the world, either first hand or through books, and is acutely unaware of the relations between men and women. When Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway join the travelers briefly, an infatuation ensues between Mr. Dalloway and Rachel, culminating in a kiss which awakens Rachel's dormant sexuality and excites her curiously about men and love. Once in Santa Marina, Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose; Mr. Pepper, an ill-humored scholar who soon departs in frustration; and Rachel take possession of a villa where Rachel is given a private room and where Mr. Ambrose devotes himself to translating the Odes of Pindar. After visiting a hotel in the town, Helen and Rachel begin a friendship with two young Englishmen: St. John Hirst, a rather pompous scholar, and Terence Hewet, a budding novelist. Hewet and Rachel are gradually drawn together, experiencing a depth of communication rare in the social milieu to which both belong. But after a picnic excursion into the jungle, where the they declare their love to each other, Rachel falls ill with fever and slips into a state of delusion. The local doctor proves incompetent, but by the time another arrives it is too late and Rachel dies, leaving Hewet disconsolate. The novel ends as Evelyn Murgatroyd and Mrs. Thornbury, guests at the hotel who had befriended the young couple, contemplate the meaning of Rachel's death, anxiously asserting that it could not have not have been an accident and that "there must be a reason." More realistic and conventional than her later works, The Voyage Out nonetheless exhibits the poetic sensibility, graceful prose style, and keen sense of deeply interior states of consciousness that distinguish Woolf as one of the twentieth century's greatest novelists.

 

          Impressionistic novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1922. Experimental in form, it centers on the character of Jacob Flanders, a lonely young man unable to         synthesize his love of classical culture with the chaotic reality of contemporary society, notably the turbulence of World War I. The novel is an examination of character development and the meaning of a life by means of a series of brief impressions and conversations, stream of consciousness, internal monologue, and Jacob's letters to his mother. In zealous pursuit of classicism, Jacob studies the ancients at Cambridge and travels to Greece. He either idealizes or ignores the women who admire him. At the end of the novel all that remains of Jacob's life are scattered objects in an abandoned room.

                       

      Stream of Consciousness in To the Lighthouse

         

        

POSTHUMOUS