The Voyage Out. By Virginia Woolf. London: Duckworth and Co. Pp 458. 6s.
This is a strong and unconventional novel of a design so simple that we can imagine Mr. Henry James asking, as he did of the younger novelists generally, why a subject should be lacking. Rachel Vinrace is a girl who has been hedged by conventions is launched into a world of people who think and speak freely, and expands fearlessly among them. She loves and dies, and her brief career is half disillusion, for she has little of the easy joys of youth. Brought up in Òsheltered gardens,Ó Òher mind was in the state of an intelligent manÕs in the reign of Queen Elizabeth,Ó and we are shown something of her education under the influence of her friends with their floods of talk and recommendations of Ibsen, Gibben, and the rest. She has the faculty, which does not belong only to youth, of finding strangeness even in the world of familiar things, and the interest and success of this book is the penetration into certain modes of consciousness. The people are not lovable, they have not a common fund of geniality, but, though the talk may sometimes seem too consciously eccentric, they are not content with facts and habits and exteriors. They do their best to give ideas their place in the world, and most of those in this inner circle are only too ready to flout manners. Even the conversation that is reported with a satirical intention is clever, and the manner in which the able politician translates Rachel's gropings into a neat formula is good comedy. But sometimes the characters talk, or think, like lotos-eaters, and sometimes they suggest a ÒDodoÓ of more serious intent than Mr. Benson's; their recklessness does represent some effort for freedom, some attempt to get at the essences, and not just a playing with fire. The scene shifts from shipboard to Spanish America, and there is some very good description in tune with character or circumstance. It may be a sleeping hotel or a spacious landscape, but it is related; it is not guide-book work.
Perhaps some readers will not be without the sense of redundancy, of explanation that is not always penetration, and even of a certain insolence of withdrawal from a world condemned as ponderous or meaningless. But beauty and significance come with Rachel's illness and death, and these modern lovers are justified in the depth and in the exaltation of their emotions. The phases of illness and delirium are marked with delicacy and imagination, and the changes in the man's mood show insight and sympathy. ÒIt seemed to him as he looked back that their happiness had never been so great as his pain was now,Ó and again, ÒHe was alone with Rachel, and a faint reflection of the sense of relief that they used to feel when they were left alone possessed him.Ó It is good to read, too, of a Òlittle elderly lady.....her eyes lighting up with zeal as she imagined herself a young man in an aeroplaneÓ Ñ ÒIf I was a young fellow,Ó she said, ÒI should certainly qualify.Ó And, among a thousand other things, there is St. John's jaunty manner, Òwhich was always irritating because it made the person he talked to appear unduly clumsy and in earnest.Ó A writer with such perceptions should be capable of great things. There is character in the book Ñ Helen, Rachel's friend, is good if not, perhaps, a full success, Ñ but it is difficult to give character in terms of conversation. And the events or definite projections of persons are so admirably done that we want more of them; nothing could be better in its way than the two doctors. If this be a first novel, as we believe it is, it is a very remarkable one; there is not merely promise, but accomplishment.