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The Voyage Out (Collins Classics)

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Absolutely unafraid . . . Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path.”—E. M. Forster Chapter IX. In the hotel, people are preparing for the night. Hirst and Hewet discuss the possibility of organising a party excursion. Next day there is desultory chat over tea until Ridley Ambrose joins with Hirst and Hewet.

E. M. Forster dramatises the double moral standard in Howards End. In the course of this novel, Margaret Wilcox finds herself called upon to forgive her husband for having had a mistress. Mr Wilcox himself, however, is unable to forgive Margaret’s sister for becoming pregnant by a married man. Forster weakens the effect of his novel, though, by inserting passages of didactic commentary in his own voice into the text, which destroy our ‘belief’ in his fictional characters. The way in which women are sexually exploited by men such as Mr Wilcox is far more persuasively illustrated in a novel like Ivan Turgenev’s On the Eve (trans. C. E. Turner (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1871)) or Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets (London: Collins, 1936) in which the reader is drawn to identify completely, and therefore to sympathise, with the heroine. For a discussion of didacticism in Howards End see Bayley’s The Uses of Division, pp. 27–35.

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Eric Warner makes this point when he remarks that ‘Rather than let Rachel fall into the end of banal routine and sacrificed spirit, [Woolf] kills the girl off with an unnamed tropical fever’. In contrast, in The Waves, the ‘contagion of the world’s slow stain’ feared in The Voyage Out is realised (see Eric Warner, ‘Some Aspects of Romanticism in the Work of Virginia Woolf’ (D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1980) pp. 119, 373). A remark which Alice van Buren Kelley makes about Woolf’s second novel links it with The Voyage Out: ‘ Night and Day ends before the lovers can experience those blows to vision that life in the real world invariably inflicts upon those who look for unity’ (Kelley, Virginia Woolf, p. 62).

Literary scholar Phyllis Rose writes in her introduction to the novel, "No later novel of Woolf's will capture so brilliantly the excitement of youth." [11] And also the excitement and challenge of life. [12] "It's not cowardly to wish to live," says one old man at the end of the book. "It's the very reverse of cowardly. Personally, I'd like to go on for a hundred years... Think of all the things that are bound to happen!" [13] Woolf's review copies for USA publication [ edit ] One must, then, question Hermione Lee’s argument that childless, fussy Mrs Elliot, absent-minded Mrs Thornbury, bovine Susan Warrington and her tyrannical old aunt, and the would-be liberated flirt, Evelyn M., are callous caricatures. There is little warmth even in the treatment of the kind academic spinster, Miss Allan, or of the jolly eccentric Mrs Flushing. The tone for the presentation of the minor characters is feebly satirical. (Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (London: Methuen, 1977) p. 38) Indeed, it is difficult to see how we could know that Miss Allan is kind or Mrs Flushing jolly unless it is through Woolf’s sympathetic treatment of them. Jean Guiget’s description of the hotel visitors as ‘a set of grotesque and ungainly puppets’ is equally inappropriate (Jean Guiget, Virginia Woolf and her Works, trans. Jean Stewart (London: Hogarth Press, 1965) p. 202). To describe the novel’s minor characters in these terms is to make the mistake of accepting Rachel’s response to them as authoritative. Woolf’s first novel straddles the conventions of realism inherited from the 19th century and the new, experimental fiction of the 20th. The Sydney text tells an important part of this story.It shines a light on Woolf’s developing technique and its evolution into the free, indirect style for which she became famous in later novels such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves. Rachel is Helen Ambrose’s twenty-something year-old niece and is herself a typical nineteenth century heroine: young, passionate, eager to fall in love, a Marianne Dashwood from Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, or, on a less passionate day, a Lucy Snowe from Brontë’s Villette. If this were an Austen novel, Rachel would be the central character and her meeting with the man she might marry would be the main event of the book. The next few months passed away, as many years can pass away, without definite events, and yet, if suddenly disturbed, it would be seen that such months or years had a character unlike others.” Chapter XVII. Rachel is powerfully disturbed by her feelings for Hewet, and a distance grows between her and Helen. One Sunday there is a service in the hotel chapel. Rachel is distressed by the absence of any genuine religious belief, and she objects to the spirit in which the service is held. When Mrs Flushing invites her to lunch, she erupts into a criticism of the sermon. Mrs Flushing proposes a river trip to visit a traditional native village. Hirst and Hewet argue over religion, literature, and Rachel. I was delighted to be invited to join in the editing of this volume, together with Sarah M. Hall, Mary Ellen Foley and Lindsay Martin. The essays range from academic analysis of particular aspects of the text to the enthusiasm of the common reader. There are accounts of the writing of the book and how it was received in 1915, personal responses to the text as both readers and teachers, discussions on questions of censorship, classical and German influences, early signs of Woolf’s modernist style and hints of her relationship with the Argentinian writer Victoria Ocampo, to give just a flavour of this wide-ranging collection.

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