The Voyage Out

Abstract

Woolf’s criticism of a great many novelists — and particularly women — centres upon the fact that they use their writing as a vehicle for confessional autobiography. A writer is, perhaps, particularly likely to use the first novel to unburden personal obsessions and experiences. Given that this is the case, the ‘objective’ tone of Woolf’s own first novel is the more remarkable. In writing The Voyage Out Woolf did, of course, draw upon the details of her own life. One thinks, for example, of her mental instability, her sister Vanessa’s illness and brother Thoby’s death from typhoid, her voyage to Spain and Portugal with her younger brother Adrian in the spring of 1905, and, particularly, her interest in feminism.1 In the novel, though, these personal experiences are transformed from autobiography into fiction.2 The emphasis in The Voyage Out falls not upon Woolf the private individual, but upon her fictional characters. It is primarily the lives of these latter, rather than that of the author, which sustain our interest.3