ABSTRACT
In 1909, Virginia Woolf wrote of her developing novel that she wanted to ‘bring out a stir of live men and women, against a background’, feeling that she was ‘quite right to attempt it, but it is immensely difficult to do’. 2 The novel in question became The Voyage Out (1915), a text where the ‘background’ is anything but secondary to the liveliness of its characters. Woolf’s emphasis on the locations and environments featured in the novel can be seen in her choice of title, which invokes the travel or adventure narrative, both of which are heavily reliant on a physical journey through space. Like Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries (1582) and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (1839) – two texts which are known to have exerted a direct influence on Woolf – the narrative trajectory traces a line from the known spaces of home to the unknown landscapes beyond Britain. 3 Yet what distinguishes these texts is that Woolf’s protagonist is a woman, and her experience of travelling through these spaces is told in relation to the cultural politics of space and sexuality that governed Woolf and her contemporaries. The importance of the ‘backgrounds’ in the novel thus place the themes of physical access and visibility at the centre of Woolf’s feminist subtext.
