Rachel Vinrace is twenty-four. She has been sheltered with love, but is now ready to discover ‘life’, to take the voyage out.

Moving away from Richmond means a real journey, for Rachel is going to travel to South America on her father’s steamer. She will, in the intimacy of shipboard life, discover the fashionable world of Mrs Dalloway, the academic arrogance of a Cambridge don and first love in the shape of Terence Hewlet who wishes that women could be the same as men

This is Virginia Woolf’s first novel. Written in a simple, flowing way, it is immediately accessible, thoroughly delightful. There are only hints of the radical innovations of her later novels, but the preoccupations which were to appear and reappear are already present. Even in this, her earliest work, the true originality which is the mark of her genius is present and wonderfully alive.