ABSTRACT
Several of Mrs. Woolf's leading characters take this globe in their hands at some stage in their experience of life. This globe, life in terms which Mrs. Woolf would never have used, it is the interaction of the organism with the environment. Mrs. Woolf is speaking of Meredith's Richard Feverel; it is equally true of her own first novel, The Voyage Out. The theme of The Voyage Out is the awakening of Rachel Vinrace, undeveloped and immature at twenty-four, feeling nothing deeply except her music, which expresses all that so far she is interested in expressing. Night and Day is an imperfect but delightful novel; with its echoes of Jane Austen and even of George Eliot, it is still authentic Virginia Woolf. Yet neither of her first two novels places her among the creators of the "modern" novel. She chose to call Orlando, her next book, a biography.
