The Voyage Out (1915), Virginia Woolf's first novel, begins in the heart of London, then quickly gathers its characters on the Euphrosyne, a ship leaving England bound for South America. The ship belongs to Willoughby Vinrace, the father of the novel's heroine, and is ordinarily used for his business, which consists of transporting dry goods to the Amazons and rubber back to England. In this case, however, the Euphrosyne has become a makeshift hotel, housing not only Willoughby and his daughter Rachel, but the motherless Rachel's maternal aunt and her husband, Helen and Ridley Ambrose, Willoughby's rheumatic friend, William Pepper, and an early incarnation of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, who have finagled their own passage by appealing to higher-ups. The interactions that take place over the course of this voyage prepare the reader for the hotel atmosphere (an atmosphere characterized by temporary connections and the bringing into close contact of those who do not know one another well) that governs the work. While life onboard ship is far from ideal, the contained—even forced—quality of the relationships it gives rise to, produces an intimacy and a sense of possibility among the passengers that is otherwise unthinkable. The hotel at the center of the work offers a greater variety of experiences and interactions than the ship does, merely by virtue of its larger and changeable pool of guests, but the Euphrosyne sets the stage for the hotel encounters that will shape the narrative.

The bulk of the novel's action takes place either onboard ship or in and around the main hotel of tourist Santa Marina, a fictional South American resort town with a convoluted history of European occupation. Here Rachel, who is twenty-four, but exceedingly sheltered and almost impossibly innocent, is initiated into a society unlike any she has known in her previous life with her father. The exposure to a wider circle of associates, combined with the implicit sanctioning of her new friendships and of her budding romance, leads Rachel to assume connections wholly outside her usual realm.