Draft of The Voyage Out (1915)
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
The Voyage Out holograph draft
March 29–December 21, 1912
Woolf began writing her first novel as early as 1907. The Voyage Out (1915) follows a twenty-four-year-old woman, Rachel, as she travels from England to an unnamed port in South America, where she lives with her uncle and beautiful young aunt, Helen, near a British resort. Relationships are formed, excursions are made, tragedy ensues. Woolf examines themes of women’s education, gender norms, and imperialism in this book, while beginning to explore stream-of-consciousness narration.
Woolf significantly reworked the drafts for several years, removing autobiographical details and obscuring homosexual relationships. Here, Rachel and Helen are fighting, rolling “hither and thither . . . with gestures which under other conditions might have been described as kisses”; in the book, the sexual tension between the two women is replaced by a heterosexual kiss between Helen and a male character.
: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
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