“Life, what was that?”

Through the window, the shades not yet drawn, came the epiphany, striking her where 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. Woolf’s first novel as well. Yet what was I left with, the reader? The tunneling elegance of Virginia Woolf? The sound of Rachel tapping her finger on the arm of a chair to recenter herself? Or the sound of the wind stirring the leaves in the trees where I sat, and visualizing this window opening to an innocence lost.