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Books

The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf

Ernest Dempsey gives a feminist analysis of Virginia Woolf’s first novel.

“You can never know women,” says Lenehen to his friend Corley in ‘Two Gallants’, one of James Joyce’s stories in his acclaimed Dubliners. Straightforwardly but not brusquely, the man is demonstrating the rift across which some unknowable species lives. To Joyce’s men a great deal of knowledge seems matter of fact, so thinking that woman is knowable would have exacted unimaginable pains. A careful look can readily grasp that more is at work in Lenehen’s adage: the implication is that woman is not worth knowing, and hence there’s no need to bother about trying to cross the eternal rift. But what the proclaimed unknowable figure has on her mind is rather complex; as explored in Virginia Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out (1915).

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