A Room of One's Own

• Purchased in the late 1970s, it had been misfiled with the science books in the Rare Books collection.
• Simon Cooper, a metadata services officer, found it in 2021 and immediately understood the value of his discovery.
• The Sydney copy, which is the only one available for the public to view, has now been digitised.
• The Voyage Out follows Rachel Vinrace and a mismatched collection of characters embarking on her father’s ship to South America.

Why revise?

• She made revisions in the aftermath of her breakdown, and after her literary career was revived with her second novel, Night and Day, published in 1919.
• Scholars have suggested she wished to place some distance between her own psychological stresses and the anguish of her primary character, Rachel Vinrace.
• The narrator is bounded by the limits of character itself: the depths of Rachel’s subjectivity are unknown even to her.
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A modernist revolution

• This innovation signals a profound shift in modernist fiction, which began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is characterised by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing.
• They are largely concerned with Rachel’s fevered consciousness and Terence’s attitudes towards romantic love and its effects on an artistic life.
• Woolf was at the centre of the revolution in the novel form during the time of modernism.