The Voyage Out

Rachel Vinrace, twenty-four and educated by nobody in particular, sails to South America on her father's ship and meets the English abroad - including a young man who wants to write a novel about silence. Woolf worked on her first book for seven years through two breakdowns, and buried in its conventional shape are the questions the rest of her work would ask. Sixty plates of harbour mouths and stormy seas by Whistler and Samuel Bough carry the novel's own weather, painted between 1820 and 1883.