“. . . And perhaps the first comment to make on ‘The Voyage Out’ is that it is absolutely unafraid, and that its courage springs, not from naïveté, but from education. Few women writers are educated. . . . Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as ‘Wuthering Heights,’ though by a different path, a book which, while written by a woman and presumably from a woman’s point of view, soars straight out of local questionings into the intellectual day. The curious male may pick up a few scraps, but if he is wise he will lift his eyes to where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, to the mountains and forest and sea that circumscribe the characters and to the final darkness that blots them out. After all he will not have learnt how women live, any more than he has learnt from Shakespeare how men perform that process; he will only have lived more intensely himself, that is to say, will have encountered literature. . . . Some readers—those who demand the milk of human kindness even in its tinned form—will say that she has not succeeded; but the bigness of her achievement should impress any one weaned from baby-food. She believes in adventure—here is the main point—believes in it passionately, and knows that it can only be undertaken alone. . . . Mrs. Woolf’s vision may be inferior to Dostoevsky’s—but she sees as clearly as he where efficiency ends and creation begins, and even more clearly that our supreme choice lies not between body and soul, but between immobility and motion. . . . It is tempting to analyse the closing chapters, which have an atmosphere unknown in English literature—the atmosphere of Jules Romains’ ‘Mort de Quelqu’un.’ But a word must be said about the comedy; the book is extremely amusing. . . . The writer can sweep together masses of characters for our amusement, then sweep them away; her comedy does not counteract her tragedy, and at the close enhances it . . . for we see that existence will continue the same for every one, for every one except the reader; he, more fortunate than the actors, is established in the possession of beauty.”—E. M. Forster in the Daily News.
“Mrs. Woolf’s book, ‘The Voyage Out,’ is that rarest of things, a novel of serious artistic value. Some of its readers may find it irritating or even boring at moments; but none of them is likely to find it unimportant. A few will even be enthusiastic, and will almost be inclined to hail the author as a genius, and the story as a classic. . . . Mrs. Woolf is by no means a mere bleak realist. One of her greatest gifts is satirical. . . . The visitors at the hotel, each of them a distinct portrait, mockingly though sympathetically painted, form an astonishingly brilliant group. . . . Not only does Mrs. Woolf possess a keen intellect, but she has imagination as well of a strange and individual sort. Her pages are filled with delightful and unexpected comparisons and brilliantly coloured descriptions. . . . Above all, perhaps, Mrs. Woolf is a consummate artist in writing. . . .”—Spectator.
“This is just the story of a voyage . . . but the filling in is done with something startlingly like genius. That is not a word to use inadvisedly, but there is something greater than talent that colours the cleverness of this book. Its perpetual effort to say the real thing and not the expected thing, its humour and its sense of irony, the occasional poignancy of its emotions, its profound originality—well, one does not wish to lose the critical faculty over any book, and its hold may be a personal and subjective matter, but among ordinary novels it is a wild swan among good grey geese to one reviewer, to whom its author’s name is entirely new and unknown.”—Observer.
