“Life, what was that?”

Through the window, the shades not yet drawn, came the epiphany, striking her, when she sat combing through a tightly matted vine of words and voices. “Life,” Rachel Vinrace thought, “what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing.” In that moment, the vague aspirations and hopefulness of a young woman shattered in The Voyage Out—her first. And what was I left with, the reader? Not the spiraling elegance of Virginia Woolf, or the sound of Rachel tapping her finger on the arm of a chair to center herself. It was the wind stirring in the leaves of the trees where I sat, the first sounds of creation, and visualizing this window here of innocence lost.