The Edwardian era (1901-1910) is the period of British history that coincides with the brief reign of King Edward VII. This early-20th-century setting is crucial to the development of characters and themes in Woolf’s novel. Because the short-lived Edwardian era was followed immediately by the violence and destruction of the Great War (World War I), it is often viewed nostalgically as a lost golden age. The British Empire was at its most extensive during this time, and wealth extracted from the colonies and from the industrializing cities made some members of the British aristocracy richer than they had ever been before. With the outbreak of war in 1914, this brief idyll began to break apart, and by the time Woolf wrote The Voyage Out, it had already begun to seem like a dream that had never been real, predicated as it was on exploitation and vast inequality.

The Edwardian era was arguably the last moment in which the aristocracy remained firmly in control of British politics. The Industrial Revolution changed the nature of commerce, drawing agricultural workers out of the countryside and into the cities where they formed a vast working class that the entire empire relied upon.