The Voyage Out

By: Virginia Woolf

Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson

The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf's haunting tale about a naïve young woman's sea voyage from London to a small resort on the South American coast. In symbolic, lyrical, and intoxicating prose, her outward journey begins to mirror her internal voyage into adulthood as she searches for her personal identity, grapples with love, and learns how to face life intellectually and emotionally. Its wit and exquisiteness and its profound depth and insight into humanity will capture the imagination of the listener.

Download the accompanying reference guide.Public Domain (P)2015 Naxos AudioBooks

It sneaks up on you.

The subject is consciousness. The setting is the English upper middle class, approximately 1910, on a long vacation in South America. The placid colonialist attitudes are well ensconced. Within these boundaries, with impeccable prose, we learn of the interior and exterior lives of many people. There are no heroics. There are those things we call love, and more. There is texture, and substance, woven into language. You, too, will take the voyage out. Juliet Stevenson is one of my favorite narrators.

Wonderful reader

Juliet Stevens has a beautiful voice and reads expressively but with restraint. Just right for this novel.

Great novel and excellent presentation

I can’t imagine anyone better to give voice to this novel than Juliette Stevenson; every character came alive in her reading of this first novel of Virginia Woolf.
And the novel itself? How is it possible that this is her first? It’s powerful and real. The writing is exquisite. Her observations of the world and her fellow countrymen are acute and accurate and uncanny and many still hold true. She was far ahead of her times.

Masterful

A very slow build, as is Woolf's wont, but a deeply satisfying, hypnotic story. Stevenson's narration is pitch perfect.

surprising

a simple story of human interaction rendered with all of the grandeur and insipidity of all of us. A precise and powerfully moving rendition of our natures.
Juliet Stevenson did credit to the writing with every shaped syllable spoken. Brava!

Under-appreciated masterpiece

If you could sum up The Voyage Out in three words, what would they be?

Subtle, painterly, psychological

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Voyage Out?

Rachel's final illness and the reactions of all the novel's characters to this event.

Which character – as performed by Juliet Stevenson – was your favorite?

The main character, Rachel Vinrace.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

This work, often dismissed as an "early" effort, not yet up to Woolf's "mature" accomplishments, is a transcendent fusion of literary artistry and psychological insight. Woolf is without peer in describing a scene of a number of characters, each with his or her own concerns and thoughts, viewing the world through the filters of their own experience. She paints with words the subtleties of thought and emotion the way Monet paints light. This is not a book of "action" or "plot development" in the customary sense. Even "character development" seems too crude a phrase to describe a process by which characters come to the verge of a deeper understanding of themselves, and occasionally each other. In Woolf's world, the gulfs that separate individuals are perilous and largely uncrossable, though the characters may reach out to each other as best they can. It is a world of simultaneous beauty and pathos, transcendence and banality, simultaneously modernist and classical.Juliet Stevenson reads with a clarity of character rendition that matches the prose. She imbues the characters with personality liveliness, even the most minor, and captures the characteristically internal action of the book with luminous understanding.

Bravo Virginia! Bravo Juliet Stevenson.

No one brings Virginia Woolf’s works as delightfully as Juliet Stevenson.
Can’t wait to read another book with Juliet Stevenson.

Splendid

I like the personality and truths that woolf revealed through the several main characters to us; and how the world seemed to have changed slightly, and fiercely, though in nature unchangeable, by the manifesting of the storm and the 'demanifesting' of the villa people after Rachael's death.

Engaging

The story is engaging, nonetheless a bit confusing as many characters disappeared and the end was cute abrupt, but you can feel that Virginia Woolf was experimenting in this amazing first novel of hers. The narration is impeccable!

Narrator was VERY impressive

Enjoyed the story. LOVED the narrator. She gave different tones to all the speakers and it really brought the book alive.