WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY FRANCES SPALDING AND ERICA WAGNER

A party of English people board the Euphrosyne bound for South America. Among them is Rachel Vinrace, young, innocent and wholly ignorant of the world of politics and society. She is a free spirit, half-caught, momentarily and passionately, by Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer. But their engagement is to end abruptly, not in marriage but in tragedy.

Published in 1915, The Voyage Out was Virginia Woolf’s first novel.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob’s Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One’s Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.