The Voyage Out
A young woman sails from England to South America with her aunt, becomes engaged to a conventional man, and then meets someone who makes her question the life that has been arranged for her. Woolf's first novel is more traditional than her later work, but the themes are already there.
The book is uneven and sometimes slow, and Woolf herself later found it immature. What it has is a sense of a mind being formed by travel and conversation, and a heroine who is allowed to be difficult. Read it as an apprentice work that shows where Mrs Dalloway came from.
Public-domain status
First published in 1915. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Virginia Woolf died in 1941, so this work has been free to republish there since 2012.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 144 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf, 1925
- Ulysses — James Joyce, 1922
- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813
- Moby-Dick — Herman Melville, 1851
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
Find a print edition on Amazon · As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Disclosure