For that reason her earlier first novel The Voyage Out (1915) is often classified as ‘traditional’ or ‘conventional’.
Virginia Woolf is rightly celebrated as one of the most talented innovators of the modernist period for the work she produced between Jacob’s Room in 1922 and The Waves in 1932.
Her one consolation is that she has been left undisturbed to develop her artistic flair for piano-playing. Rachel is intensely conscious of her lack of formal education, her powerlessness in society, and her exclusion from the male-dominated world of governance and decision-making. The shape of the earth, the history of the world, how trains worked, or money was invested, what laws were in force, which people wanted what, and why they wanted it, the most elementary idea of a system in modern life-none of this had been imparted to her by any of her professors or mistresses Her mind was in the state of an intelligent man’s in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth she would believe practically anything she was told. There was no subject in the world which she knew accurately. Her first novel is no exception – as an exploration of a young woman who has received no formal education and who has been brought up at home in a manner which does not prepare her for any sort of independent adult life. Virginia Woolf was to devote a great deal of her career as a novelist and essayist to issues of women’s education and their position in society – from her earliest story Phyllis and Rosamond (1906) to her epoch-making attack on patriarchy Three Guineas (1938). But when her own publishing house the Hogarth Press produced a Uniform Edition of Woolf’s works in 1929, it was the later 1915 version that was used as the definitive text. This alternative version was published with that title in 1962. It was originally called Melymbrosia, and an earlier version was completed in 1912. It was written and re-written many times between (probably) 1907 and its eventual publication by Duckworth in 1915 (the publishing house run by her step-brother Gerald Duckworth). The Voyage Out was Virginia Woolf’s first full length novel.
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