The Voyage Out is written by Virginia Woolf, her first novel, published in 1915.
The story is about a sea expedition, where the main characters are aboard the cargo boat,
Euphrosyne, that set off from London to the tropical South American island of Santa Marina. Parallel to this journey, the book sets up an intensive versatile scholarly programme for the 24-year-old Rachel Vinrace. Her education is primarily centred around the classics and carried out by a group of educators composed by relatives and friends.
As the story moves through this excursion, Rachel becomes engaged to Terence Hewet, a young ambitious writer, with the reader almost expecting for a conventional marriage. This is not meant to be. Rachel is suddenly stricken ill. She succumbs to a devastating fever, and eventually dies. Her
death is
preceded by
descriptive scenes of delirious hallucinations, the ebb of the story. Rachel's death, preceded by moving descriptive scenes of hallucinations, leaves the novel on the brink of
narrative crisis.
Rachel's psychodrama, written simultaneously with Virginia Woolf's own bouts of mental illness, offers the best narrative for its realism for who could best describe it than the author herself suffering the same mental agony. Virginia Woolf is known for her stream-of-consciousness technique.
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