"this curious silent unrepresented life": Representation and Lesbian Sexuality in Woolf's The Voyage Out

Abstract

Virginia Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out features a character named Terence Hewet, a putative author whose aesthetic project is to write a novel called and about "Silence—the Things People don't say." Terence outlines his interest in the lives of ordinary women and his distaste for the manner in which women are represented in patriarchal discourse. As several critics of The Voyage Out have noted Hewet's comments offer a first glimpse of some of the issues which were to evolve into major preoccupations in Woolf's work. Indeed over a period of thirteen years Hewet's voice develops until in A Room of One's Own—or in the fashion of the maturing process of Room's parallel text Orlando—it becomes that of a woman writer: "all the great women of fiction" we are told in Room "were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of women's life is that." The types of women who are referred to by Terence—older, single and working women—were to become important figures in Woolf's writing, and The Voyage Out itself seems to illustrate Terence's project.