The Voyage Out

by Virginia Woolf

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Rachel Vinrace leaves England aboard her father’s ship and travels with a group of British passengers to the fictional South American resort of Santa Marina. Sheltered and inexperienced, she encounters courtship, intellectual conversation and social expectations through her relationship with the aspiring writer Terence Hewet. The voyage and expatriate hotel community expose divisions of class, gender and education within Edwardian society, as well as the assumptions carried abroad by British travellers. Rachel’s awakening is shadowed by illness and death, turning the coming-of-age plot into a critique of conventional marriage and restricted female experience.