The conspicuous obsession of the upper middle class people in Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, is with work. Upholding a Victorian legacy that valorizes work and industry as a vehicle of the self-cultivation and a proof of personal respectability, these people feel responsible for, involved in, or at least interested in the project of educating Rachel Vinrace whom they largely presume to do nothing. Rachel’s idleness in the novel is at once taken for granted and yet subtly berated and controlled. Far from doing nothing, however, Rachel constantly thinks, reads, and grows in her own way. Through the very act of being idle―thinking, reading, and playing which nobody in the novel is capable of reading properly― she educates herself. Her ostensible idleness provides an alternative possibility of Bildung as it enables her to see through the social system and to reach the epiphanic moments of being, that is, the moments of an impersonal state connected to things and beings, while fashioning her own individuality. Rachel is not so much killed off by social reality or the marriage plot that plots against her life; rather, she remains undead, living beyond the world that she finds lazy and dull.