The Voyage Out: a Feminist Education Novel or How Women are Educated for their Entry into Society

Abstract

The article intends to shed light upon Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out from the perspective of what different scholars have conceived of as education novel. Integrating previous criticism on Woolf’s narrative, it thus aims to examine the fundamental features of the subgenre in which it roots. First, it inquiries into the diverse formative stages passed through by the character in her formation as an English subject of the beginning of the XXth Century. Second, and immediately related to the concrete ways in which these stages are passed, the article suggests that The Voyage Out could be read as a frustrated specimen of the genre –given that the formative goal is not achieved– and, feminist.