Virginia Woolf's first novel, seven years and two breakdowns in the making, sends the sheltered, half-educated Rachel Vinrace across the ocean on her father's ship to South America — and into the company of the English abroad, among them a young man who dreams of writing a novel about silence. Beneath its conventional surface stir all the questions Woolf's later work would make famous. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 50 full-page color plates, Church's tropics among them.