To a greater extent than any novelist except Joyce, Woolf invented the modernist novel, a drastic departure from the traditional form, with its heroics and high emotions; its morality; its unwavering point of view and its unambiguous beginning, middle and end. The novel, in Woolf's hands, became prismatic, ambiguous, at least slightly chaotic, amoral and poetic, and concerned itself primarily with outwardly unremarkable people. It strove less to tell an uplifting tale and more to render life as lived, in its endless overlaps of the quotidian and the profound. Since Woolf's time, novels in the traditional mode have continued to be written by the boxcar load, but the novel as an art form has never been the same.

Woolf believed (these are my words, not hers) that the meticulously structured, often inspirational novels of her time had about as much to do with the world and those who live in it as did a boat full of colonials and missionaries venturing into a jungle determined to subdue it. It was one of Woolf's contributions to insist, in her fiction, that the world is too huge and mysterious, too impenetrably itself, for fiction as fiction is so often written; that any writer's attempt to clear the field of its vines and creepers, to frighten off the hostile animals so as to set up a table for tea and begin to demonstrate a proper sense of right and wrong, is unlikely to come to a good or useful end. In her fiction Woolf bore witness to the world, saw and recorded some of its patterns, but did not attempt to enforce upon it any particular order or demand that it produce an order of its own. For this innovation she has often been accused of writing about nothing at all.

"The Voyage Out" employs the oldest and most venerable of narrative devices, the journey. It specifically concerns the fate of Rachel Vinrace, whose vivacious and compelling mother died when she was 11, leaving her to be raised by her chilly father and two spinster aunts. Rachel is, at 24, almost pathologically unformed. She knows nothing whatever about sex, has had only a smattering of education and is hard put to hold up her end in an ordinary conversation. She is, however, a relatively accomplished pianist, and playing the piano is her one true passion. In her way she is the idealized Artist with a capital A -- incompetent at and largely indifferent to everything except her art.

The novel begins with an ocean voyage onboard a modest passenger steamer, the Euphrosyne (so named by Woolf as a private joke -- it was the title of a collection of solemn poetry she considered ridiculous, published by her husband and some of her friends). The ship is sailing from England to South America, and then sailing up the Amazon. Onboard, Rachel is befriended -- "adopted" might be more accurate -- by her aunt, Helen Ambrose, a forceful, unsentimental woman in her early 40s who is at least as central to the novel as Rachel.

They disembark at Santa Marina, a village on the South American coast, take up residence in a haphazard villa with a neglected garden and become involved with the denizens of the village's only hotel, among them two young men: St. John Hirst, who bears a strong resemblance to Lytton Strachey and who falls in love with Helen, and Terence Hewet, an aspiring novelist, who argues many of Woolf's own positions about writing and who falls in love with Rachel.

Ultimately, certain members of the group undertake a second voyage, up a river and into the jungle, and that is what changes everything.

"The Voyage Out" tells the tale of its doomed lovers amid a chorus of other stories, other points of view. An essential element of Woolf's genius, visible from the beginning of her career, is her insistence on a fictive world too large and complex to focus its exclusive attention on any individual life. Try to enter the consciousness of a person, any person, and you are led immediately to dozens of other people, each of whom is integral, each in a different way. Woolf understood that every character about whom she wrote, even the most marginal, was visiting her novel from a novel of his or her own, and that that other, unwritten novel had as its main concerns the passions and fate of this character -- this dowager or child or septuagenarian, this young woman who appears in the novel at hand only long enough to walk through a park.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"