Woolf is an absolute expert at writing and developing her characters. Everyone has such a unique voice that not a single time have I got lost in the dialogue or confused about who said what. It also feels like I could spend a considerable amount of time dissecting each of them and making a list of all the different points and viewpoints they express regarding love, attraction, marriage, and many other things. Every conversation, every relationship, every mind in this book is so complex that I cannot help but admire Woolf’s perceptiveness—which she must have possessed in real life—to capture all the different and subtle interpersonal dynamics she did in this book. I do not know if it is her who finally found her groove around chapter 15 or me, but I was not expecting this book to speak so much to me.

It brings me so much enjoyment when fiction authors reference other books in their work and use them to characterize their own characters. There are not enough contemporary authors that do what Woolf and her predecessors did with intertextuality. It is yet another reason why the time spent reading Virginia Woolf is time well spent.

My impressions are numerous and not necessarily connected, so this post is just a brain dump.

1. My timeline of reading Woolf is something like this: A Room of One's Own (let's say 5 years ago) > To The Lighthouse (4 years ago) > Orlando (3 years ago) > Mrs Dalloway (1 year ago) > *A Room of One's Own (a few days ago) > The Voyage Out (now). The first two texts went smoothly and I adore them to this day; Orlando was too complicated in terms of language for my brain at the time; Mrs Dalloway was significantly less interesting to me in terms of characters compared to To the Lighthouse; A Room of One's Own was a delight and surprisingly easy to read the second time around; The Voyage Out is similarly surprisingly easy to read thus far, especially remembering how much I struggled with Orlando and Mrs Dalloway. At first I thought that maybe I just got better at English and that is why The Voyage Out seems significantly easier to read, but on the second thought, it is probably just the fact that this is Virginia's first novel and she is clearly just trying out the genre of the novel. That is why the narrator isn't the omniscient shifting first-person voice yet, and this is why the narration style is so much more classic and uncomplicated in terms of literary devices and vocabulary.

2. Speaking of literary devices, I always found Virginia's texts requiring significant effort from the reader to understand the twistings and turnings of her metaphors, comparisons, and the like; however, reading The Voyage Out after her love letter to Shakespeare that is A Room of One's Own, I find that I see her metaphors differently--they don't necessarily need to be actively decoded and understood. After all, Shakespeare likewise wrote lines that defied the logic of language and comprehension. Virginia is deliberately writing poetically to capture the feeling, not to define it, and if some of the metaphors I do not get--that's okay, I just don't understand the feeling itself.

3. The way she jabs at the social and cultural conditioning of the genders gets me every time. I couldn't help but smile at this one: "Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex, highly trained in promoting men's talking without listening to it, could think – about the education of children, about the use of fog sirens in an opera – without betraying herself."

4. Getting back to the juxtaposition of these two texts, I don't think there could be a more perfect companion text for The Voyage Out than A Room of One's Own. After reading the latter, the former cannot be read without acutely understanding its chronological place in the historicity of the female novel. The way women interact among themselves and with men in The Voyage Out is a direct representation of ideological, cultural, and social evolution that took place between Austen and Brontë works and Virginia's time. What a genius move to put these two texts together to not only show how Virginia thought, but how her practical, ideological ideas shaped her work.