think gather courage as go on. The only possible reason for writing down all this, is that it represents roughly view of one s own. My boldness terrifies me. (February 1909, Letters 1:383) In July of 1905 Virginia Stephen wrote to Nelly Cecil (Lady Robert), with whom she had been sharing manuscripts and discussing writing, I feel always that writing is an irreticent thing to be kept in dark - like (Letters 1:196). Virginia had already expressed to Nelly her anxiety about publication several times, once thanking her for her encouraging criticism because a poor wretch of an author keeps all his thoughts in dark attic in his own brain, and when they come out in print they look so shivering and (167). She confessed that the temptation to stick things into great desk that have, is increasing. don't see why one should ever be (195). Thus from beginning Virginia Woolf's career was marked by tension between desire to publish, to make public her shivering, naked visions, and desire to keep them in dark drawers of her desk and mind, to protect herself through silence. This tension manifests itself in self-censorship evident in transformations from drafts to published works, remarked upon and analyzed by such critics as Louise DeSalvo, Jane Marcus, Alice Fox, and others. It is also evident, believe, in Woolf's use of indirect methods of expression, ways of telling it slant, such as allusion, symbol and metaphor (often heavily coded), humor, hints, irony, and understatement to express feminist critique and to handle problem of telling truth about [her] own experiences as body (Professions 241).(1) The responsibility of critic toward such writer is at least twofold: to help writer's cryptic and messages to be heard - to re-member her texts - and to explore why she felt compelled, apparently, to censor herself. In this article do both in my reading of The Voyage Out. My goals are to show that not only did Woolf write about incest and child abuse in her fiction and use writing as mode of self-construction and survival, as Louise DeSalvo demonstrates in her groundbreaking work Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, but that Woolf's writing also constitutes, in its form as well as content, both symptom of her abuse and social history of female subjectivity. contend that Woolf's experiences of incest were originatory of her self-censorship as well as of her passionate dissection of and protest against British patriarchy. Further, through my reading of The Voyage Out as text, demonstrate that Woolf's text enacts even as it tells how sexual abuse is major obstacle to development of female subject, to achievement of agency in discourse and society. Woolf makes clear that sexual abuse functions as part of larger process of female socialization. My analysis relies on understanding, admirably laid out by Christine Froula, that sexual abuse of girls and women is continuous with their abuse (repression, oppression, denigration, marginalization) and constitutive of that cultural achievement, women's silence (Daughter's 121, 117, and passim). Virginia Stephen's comparison of writing to hysterics suggests one reason for her ambivalence about publication. On some level young writer knew that her writing, like symptoms of hysterics, pointed to disturbing family secrets and revolutionary disaffection with established systems of family and society. Like symptoms of hysterics, her writing reveals, sometimes in code, sometimes directly, her experience as patriarchal daughter and an incest victim, and her analysis of male power system by which she was abused.(2) Claire Kahane suggests that one of Freud's contributions to understanding of hysteria was his realization that hysterical symptoms could be read as coded representations of his patients' stories. …