+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p607 O 30 ’19 1250w
WOOLF, VIRGINIA (STEPHEN) (MRS LEONARD WOOLF). Voyage out. *$2.25 (1½c) Doran
20–8627
In this kaleidoscopic picture of real life, people come and go with all their commonplace attributes. They are natural people and act naturally without any dramatic high lights to throw them into relief. To make the events transpire in a little world of their own a shipboard is chosen and a tourist’s hotel on a South-American mountain side. Helen Ambrose, wife of a Greek scholar, is put in charge of a niece, twenty years her junior, who at the age of twenty-four is still a child in world wisdom and experience. Helen, with rare insight and good sense, undertakes to initiate her into a larger life. In South America they meet the tourists—a variety of types compressed into a miniature world. Here Rachel unfolds and the greatest of experiences, love, comes her way, and there it all ends. Rachel falls a victim to the treacherous climate.
“To the reviewer, the opportunity to read about people who are real, but intelligent, is an unusual delight. These people employ self-control and common sense, even as you and I, and the plot proceeds without misunderstanding or murder.” R. M. Underhill
+ Bookm 51:685 Ag ’20 350w
“The story is strangely lacking in construction. It has neither beginning nor end nor single point of view, but it is thoroly interesting, a distinctly unusual book.”
+ − Ind 103:53 Jl 10 ’20 250w
“For all its tragic interest ‘The voyage out’ is not low-keyed; it even has a slight buoyancy of tone, as if clear perception itself brought a continual zest to its writer. Mrs Woolf has the diversity of power which makes the great writer of narrative.” C. M. Rourke