Virginia Woolf's Early Novels: The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob's Room, and Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf has a reputation for being difficult, and the books that built it are the ones most people try first. A reader who opens Mrs Dalloway cold, without a feel for how Woolf moves from one mind to another, can lose track of who is thinking within a few pages and decide the whole thing is not for them.

What is less often said is that Woolf did not begin that way. Her first two novels are long, have chapters, follow a small group of characters through a recognisable plot, and would not look out of place beside Edwardian fiction by her contemporaries. The method she is famous for was worked out in public, book by book, and the four novels available on Project Gutenberg show the whole process.

This guide describes those four books in order of publication, explains what changes between each one and the next, and suggests where to start depending on how much patience you have. It describes openings and structure. It does not reveal how any of the novels end.

The Voyage Out: a conventional novel with Woolf’s eye

The Voyage Out, published in 1915, is Woolf’s first novel and the longest of the four, in twenty-seven chapters.¹ It opens on a London street in early October with a tall man and a woman in a long blue cloak, Mr and Mrs Ambrose, walking to the Embankment to board a ship. The ship is the Euphrosyne, owned by Mrs Ambrose’s brother-in-law Willoughby Vinrace, and the passenger who matters is his daughter Rachel, twenty-four, sheltered, and musical. After the crossing the book settles in Santa Marina, an invented South American resort town, among the English guests of a hotel.

Why start here? It reads like a novel. There is a voyage, an arrival, a hotel full of people with names and histories, and a slow courtship between Rachel and a young man called Terence Hewet. Woolf’s later concerns are visible, especially her interest in what people fail to say to one another and in moments where a character’s attention drifts away from the conversation, but the narrator still explains who is in the room and what they are doing there. Two passengers on the ship are a politician named Richard Dalloway and his wife Clarissa, who leave early. Remember them.

Night and Day: the last book with a conventional plot

Night and Day, published in 1919, is thirty-four chapters set in London.² It opens on a Sunday evening in October with Katharine Hilbery pouring out tea in her family’s house in Chelsea, “with perhaps a fifth part of her mind” on the task, while Ralph Denham, a young man who works in a solicitor’s office, sits awkwardly among the guests. Katharine is the granddaughter of a famous Victorian poet and helps her mother with an unfinished biography of him. Around her are Ralph, a suffrage worker called Mary Datchet, and the fastidious William Rodney, who wants to marry her.

Why second? It is the most traditionally plotted of Woolf’s novels, with engagements, misunderstandings, walks across London, and conversations that resolve things. What is new is how much time Woolf spends inside Katharine’s private preoccupation with mathematics and astronomy, which she hides from her literary family. If you want to see the method about to change, this is the book in which the old form is stretched furthest before Woolf abandons it.

Jacob’s Room: the break

Jacob’s Room, from 1922, is much shorter, in fourteen chapters of very uneven length.³ It opens on a beach in Cornwall with a widow, Betty Flanders, writing a letter and crying so that the ink blots, while her small son Jacob wanders off among the rocks. The book then follows Jacob to Cambridge, London, Paris, and Greece, but it follows him from the outside and at a distance, through the people who see him, the rooms he leaves, and the letters his mother writes.

Why third? This is where Woolf stops narrating in the usual way. Scenes shift without warning, minor characters are given a paragraph of inner life and then dropped, and the narrator openly admits that she does not know what Jacob is thinking. The chapters are a help: some are a few pages, one is very long, and you can treat each as a session. Read it after the first two and the change is startling; read it first and it can feel arbitrary. Notice how often the book describes an empty room, and ask what the title means.

Mrs Dalloway: a single June day

Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925, has no chapter divisions at all, only occasional breaks in the text.⁴ It begins with a sentence many readers know, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” and follows Clarissa Dalloway through one day in London in June as she prepares for a party that evening. Peter Walsh, who wanted to marry her when they were young, is back from India. Across the city, a war veteran named Septimus Warren Smith and his Italian wife Rezia sit in Regent’s Park while a doctor’s appointment approaches. Big Ben strikes the hours throughout.

Why fourth? Everything that was new in Jacob’s Room is here in a controlled form. The narration passes from one mind to another by way of shared sights, a car in Bond Street, an aeroplane writing letters in the sky, a passer-by, so that you are inside Peter’s head and then inside a stranger’s without a chapter break to warn you. If you have read the earlier books, you know Clarissa already from the ship in The Voyage Out, and you have seen Woolf practise this kind of hand-off in Jacob’s Room. If you have not, the main help is to stop fighting for a plot and let the clock structure the day.

Which order?

Publication order is the most informative, but the two early books are long. A compromise is to read The Voyage Out for the Dalloways and the voice, skip to Jacob’s Room for the break, and finish with Mrs Dalloway.

Readers who like the long early novels may want to compare them with Henry James, whose attention to what goes unsaid Woolf admired and argued with. For another writer who moved from plain narration to something more interior within a short career, see Kate Chopin.

Content notes

Mrs Dalloway deals with the mental illness of a veteran of the First World War and with the medical treatment of the period; the doctors’ confidence is part of the point. The book includes suicide. Jacob’s Room is shadowed by the same war, and The Voyage Out includes serious illness. All four books contain the casual class and colonial attitudes of educated English people of their time, reported rather than endorsed.

How to read Woolf on BlueReader

Each of the four novels has an EPUB download on its Project Gutenberg page. Save the file, upload it to BlueReader, and once the server has finished processing it the book appears on your bookshelf and remembers your place on whichever device you open it.⁵

For Mrs Dalloway, use the text breaks or the striking of the clock as stopping points. For the two long early novels, a chapter a session is enough.