VIRGINIA Woolf's first book is not generally recog nized as belonging to that fictional genre which de scribes the author's own youthful emergence, the making of the artist. Yet its heroine is nearly a self-portrait. She is a sensitive young woman with artistic propensities, her creator's intellectual preoccupations, and an anxiety over the problem of marriage which was Woolf's own. While we do not attend the entire course of Rachel Vinrace's brief history, we witness the final stages of her journey towards selfhood as a metaphoric as well as literal" voyage out." The novel resem bles the versions of autobiography being composed at nearly the same moment by Joyce and Lawrence. Both Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Sons and Lovers stop at the threshold of that later time in which the hero will be trans formed into the author who writes the story. But the passage onward is, in each case, still uncertain, haunted by the an guish of the arrival; it has nearly cost all for Stephen and Paul to have come through. Lawrence, particularly, was not con fident, writing so hard upon the experience he recorded, that he could guarantee his hero a new life; he spoke of him as being" left in the end naked of everything with the drift towards death." Rachel does actually die at the end of The Voyage Out, of a fever caught in the tropical country to which she voyaged. It is as though her creator could not see how this almost-self might survive into the new life she had discovered. This is the only explanation that makes sense of the way the novel terminates. Virginia Woolf had survived her growing up to the point of marrying, as Rachel was planning to do. The writing of her book itself affirmed for the author her