The Voyage Out

Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, opens with a party of English people aboard the Euphrosyne bound for South America. Among them is Rachel Vinrace, a young girl, innocent and wholly ignorant of the world of politics and society, books, sex, love and marriage. She is a free spirit half-caught, momentarily and passionately, by Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer met in Santa Marina. But their engagement is to end abruptly, not in marriage but in tragedy.