The Voyage Out

Reprint (first thus by this publisher). [1937]. 8vo. 375pp. Pale green cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine; top edges green, fore edges untrimmed. 1/5,000 copies printed and issued in June 1937 at 98 cents. Originally published by Duckworth in London in 1915. A number of textual changes were made by the author, chiefly to chapter 16, for the first U.S. edition by George H. Doran in 1920. These were carried over onto the second U.S. edition in 1926 by Harcourt, Brace & Co., of which this is a reprint.

Sans dustwrapper. Sunned to spine and boards' extremities, light off-setting to endpapers, else Very Good.

Author's first novel, originally entitled Melymbrosia, about a young woman's journey of self-discovery set against the backdrop of a South American ocean voyage. Woolf began writing it in 1910 and completed several drafts prior to its publication in 1915. During its lengthy composition she suffered from bouts of depression and attempted suicide, but the resultant work contained the seeds of what was to become her hallmark: an innovative narrative style with its multiple levels of consciousness, its detailed portraits of characters' inner lives, and its constant shifts between the quotidian and the profound.

Includes the first introduction of Clarissa Dalloway, of Mrs Dalloway (1925) fame, with the character of St John Hirst being a fictional portrait of Lytton Strachey and Helen Ambrose inspired by Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell. While the protagonist's journey from a cloistered life in London to freedom, intellectual discourse and discovery, reflects Woolf's own journey from an upper-class Victorian household to the intellectual stimulation of the Bloomsbury Group. Praised by E. M. Forster as "absolutely unafraid," and "a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path."

[Kirkpatrick A1d]