Dancing
At the beginning of the novel, Rachel thinks that it "it appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant or even talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.” This is an introduction to Rachel's opinion about music, which will be a recurring motif in the rest of the novel. Later, Rachel's beliefs are strengthened when she plays the piano at a party: “Once their feet fell in with the rhythm they showed a complete lack of self-consciousness.” Here we see that music has the power to make people truly themselves, which is also true of Helen who danced “like a child skipping through a meadow.”
London
At the beginning of the novel, London is depicted as dark, dreary and polluted. Woolf uses pathetic fallacy to reflect Helen's feelings as she prepares to embark on her travels to South America, leaving her two children behind. She is described as being filled with "misery for her children, the poor, the rain," and her mind is described as being "like a wound exposed to dry in the air." Woolf's descriptions of London in this text are largely negative, for example: "In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand."
South America
This setting is depicted as being exotic to the characters and is described with rich imagery, focusing on the warm weather and colorful surroundings. Woolf describes the mountains, villages, jungles and villas in this novel, giving us an insight into what the characters are experiencing in their surroundings.
