Writing "The Voyage Out" was a struggle for Woolf -- she not only doubted her gifts but felt she was already rather old to be working on a first novel -- and from its initial conception to its finished state the book went through eight or nine drafts. Early in the effort she wrote to her friend Madge Vaughan:

My only defense is that I write of things as I see them; & I am quite conscious all the time that it is a very narrow, & rather bloodless point of view. I think -- if I were Mr. Gosse writing to Mrs. Green! -- I could explain a little why this is so from external reasons, such as education, way of life, &c. And so perhaps I may get something better as I grow older. George Eliot was near 40 I think, when she wrote her first novel, the Scenes [of Clerical Life].

But my present feeling is that this vague & dream like world, without love, or heart, or passion, or sex, is the world I really care about, & find interesting. For, though they are dreams to you, & I can't express them at all adequately, these things are perfectly real to me.

But please don't think for a moment that I am satisfied, or think that my view takes in any whole. Only it seems to me, better to write of the things I do feel, than to dabble in things I frankly don't understand in the least. That is the kind of blunder -- in literature -- which seems to me ghastly & unpardonable: people, I mean, who wallow in emotions without understanding them.

Woolf was then and remains today unparalleled in her ability to convey the sensations and complexities of the experience known as being alive. Any number of writers manage the big moments beautifully; few do as much with what it feels like to live through an ordinary hour on a usual day. As she said when speaking to a reading group,

In the course of your daily life this week ... you have overheard scraps of talk that filled you with amazement. You have gone to bed at night bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In one day thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder.

She was revolutionary in her shunning of the outwardly dramatic (most famously when she dispatched Mrs. Ramsay in a single sentence in "To the Lighthouse"), and her insistence on the inwardly dramatic -- her implied conviction that what's important in a life, what remains at its end, is less likely to be its supposed climaxes than its unexpected moments of awareness, often arising out of unremarkable experience, so deeply personal they can rarely be explained.

If this belief seems only slightly unusual today, it was almost scandalous early in the century, when serious writers were expected to write about large and "serious" subjects. The generation of writers that immediately preceded Woolf -- prominent Edwardians like Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells -- tended to scorn the younger Georgians -- like Woolf, Joyce and T.S. Eliot -- for what they considered inadequate attention to the histories and circumstances of their characters and for a more general lack of mythic scope and scale; a lack of "greatness," if you will. Woolf countered by insisting that everything one needed to know about human life was contained in every human action. It was contained, for instance, in two old women gossiping over their tea or in a sad young man wandering through London, more or less the way the blueprint for an entire organism is contained in each of its cells. The trick was to see those two women or that young man completely, and then to see the invisible lines that connected them to other people, and then others, until you had at least in theory the whole of existence laid out before you.

So Woolf was drawn, throughout her career, to unexceptional lives (barring "Orlando," which she wrote for the exceptional Vita Sackville-West), the better to see the enormity contained in them without the distractions of battle, quest or heroic romance. Her artists are never successful; her scholars and politicians have never gone as far as they'd hoped. She said in her 1924 lecture "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," about the experience of sharing a railway carriage with an elderly stranger:

The elderly lady ... whom I will call Mrs. Brown ... was one of those clean, threadbare old ladies whose extreme tidiness -- everything buttoned, fastened, tied together, mended and brushed up -- suggests more extreme poverty than rags and dirt. There was something pinched about her -- a look of suffering, of apprehension, and, in addition, she was extremely small. Her feet, in their clean little boots, scarcely touched the floor. I felt that she had nobody to support her; that she had to make up her mind for herself; that, having been deserted, or left a widow, years ago, she had led an anxious, harried life, bringing up an only son, perhaps, who, as likely as not, was by this time beginning to go to the bad ...

Myriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas crowd into one's head on such occasions; one sees the person, one sees Mrs. Brown, in the centre of all sorts of different scenes. I thought of her in a seaside house, among queer ornaments; sea-urchins, models of ships in glass cases. Her husband's medals were on the mantelpiece. She popped in and out of the room, perching on the edges of chairs, picking meals out of saucers, indulging in long, silent stares ... There she sits in the corner of the carriage -- that carriage which is travelling, not from Richmond to Waterloo, but from one age of English literature to the next, for Mrs. Brown is eternal, Mrs. Brown is human nature, Mrs. Brown changes only on the surface, it is the novelists who get in and out -- there she sits and not one of the Edwardian writers has so much as looked at her. They have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature ...

I asked (the Edwardians) -- they are my elders and betters -- How shall I begin to describe this woman's character? And they said: "Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe --" But I cried: "Stop! Stop!" And I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs. Brown, that vision to which I cling though I know no way of imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished forever.

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