It is pure Woolf, then -- it could be Woolf herself speaking -- when Rachel says of her elderly aunts, who are still living their uneventful lives in England as she sails to South America:

And there's a sort of beauty in it -- there they are at Richmond at this very moment building things up. They're all wrong, perhaps, but there's a sort of beauty in it ... It's so unconscious, so modest. And yet they feel things. They do mind if people die. Old spinsters are always doing things. I don't quite know what they do. Only that was what I felt when I lived with them. It was very real.

Rachel appreciates the commonplace. She is intelligent (but not spectacularly so), perceptive (but not incisive). She is so naive as to be practically blank. In part because she is so guileless, Rachel is open to the forces of revelation that lay dormant almost everywhere. As she wanders along a river the day after a party -- the first truly exciting party to which she has ever been -- she passes flowering trees "which Helen had said were worth the voyage out merely to see. April had burst their buds, and they bore large blossoms among their glossy leaves with petals of a thick wax-like substance coloured an exquisite cream or pink or deep crimson." Most writers would be content with this: A girl walks among beautiful trees and thinks about her first real party, which has offered the possibility of love. Woolf, however, takes it considerably further:

So she might have walked until she had lost all knowledge of her way, had it not been for the interruption of a tree, which, although it did not grow across her path, stopped her as effectively as if the branches had struck her in the face. It was an ordinary tree, but to her it appeared so strange that it might have been the only tree in the world. Dark was the trunk in the middle, and the branches sprang here and there, leaving jagged intervals of light between them as distinctly as if it had but that second risen from the ground. Having seen a sight that would last her for a lifetime, and for a lifetime would preserve that second, the tree once more sank into the ordinary ranks of trees, and she was able to seat herself in its shade and to pick the red flowers with the thin green leaves which were growing beneath it.

Parties pale -- love itself pales -- beside a glimpse of the ineffable, what Flannery O'Connor would call "the very heart of mystery," and which O'Connor found, variously, in grandmothers, murderers, a stain on a ceiling and a sty full of pigs.

If O'Connor was a Catholic visionary, Woolf was a secular one. She searched for the quintessential; she strove to know (or invent) the world's secret names for itself. And so Rachel, her first heroine, is not so much a woman of actions or qualities as she is an engine of perception. At a picnic, early in the book, when Terence asks Rachel what she is looking at so intently, she answers, "Human beings." She is simple enough, strange enough, to say something like that, something so direct and wise yet so insufficient. It is part of the novel's business to keep showing her these human beings, and these singular and eternal trees, until she begins not only to see them but to take them in. The effort will ultimately kill her.

Although in her work Woolf ignored sex to the greatest possible degree, and was skeptical of mysticism, she believed in an immense connectedness. As a writer she was deeply concerned not only with the kinship of people (she became friendly with E.M. Forster, who gave us the phrase "Only connect") but with simultaneity; with the fact that the world is made up of beings, human and animal, all living at once; that all are both related and utterly strange to one another; and that what connects them, most importantly, is the medium of time -- the plain fact of finding themselves alive at the same moment; and then, somewhat altered, at the next moment; and the next and the next. She stringently rejected religion but flirted all her life with the notion of the soul or, if not the soul, a certain beingness that emanated from living and inanimate things, even from the earth itself. She made it her business to try to account not only for the movements of her characters' flesh but the existence and interactions of their spirits in a world that also possessed a life of its own.

"The Voyage Out" is saturated with the tension between Woolf's own desire to record the pure sensation of living, her desire to tell a story and her desire to use her fiction to make potent arguments about serious questions. It is hard to find 20 consecutive pages in "The Voyage Out" that don't contain some discussion between two or more characters on an issue of great import. She would in her later books more seamlessly manage the combination of art and argument.

"Jacob's Room," her elegy for her brother Thoby, is by implication an antiwar novel, as is "Mrs. Dalloway." "Mrs. Dalloway," the first of her great books, began in Woolf's mind not only as the story of a society woman who would die, either by accident or by her own hand, and as a novel about the aftermath of World War I, but as a general indictment of medical science and of the English social and political systems. The Prime Minister was to be a prominent (and, we assume, less than attractive) character, and the ham-fisted doctors were to play significantly larger parts.

It is a testament to Woolf as an artist that her interest in humanness, and her respect for the ambiguity of human existence, always won out, and the finished books are about complex people who consider themselves the heroes of their own stories. Still, it is rare to find in her work any instance of an intelligent, humane politician, a competent doctor or an adherent of religion who is not at least slightly deranged. Woolf lived, after all, through the devastation of World War I, which she called "a preposterous masculine fiction." She lived at a time when doctors treated mental disorders by extracting teeth (she herself had several pulled), in the belief that an infection of the teeth could somehow poison the brain.

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