[pynch]

Let’s take this to the next level.

When I started this almost five years ago, I had a vague editorial idea in mind: I wanted to present the books and pamphlets in chronological order to show when certain texts were first available to readers, but never consistently followed that concept. Consulting B.J. Kirkpatrick’s bibliography (which I had not done before), I found that there were several shorter texts deemed important enough by V.W. to be released independently in small books or pamphlets (Two Stories (1917), Kew Gardens (1919), Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924), On Being Ill (1930), A Letter to a Young Poet (1932), Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), and Reviewing (1939)). They have their own entries now and their texts were proofed again against scans of the original publications. I did the same with the two posthumous publications I missed: Contemporary Writers, with more essays, from 1965, and Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble, a short children’s book from a new-found manuscript in 1966. As Women and Writing was never a Hogarth Press release, I have taken it out of the list; the texts, newly obtained from The Essays of V.W., can now be found in that section. Indexes and covers were updated accordingly. (If you have the silly idea of numbering the books on their covers, they need updates, too.)

I have proofed Books and Portraits, A Writer’s Diary, Moments of Being, Roger Fry, The Common Reader II, and The Letters with Lytton Strachey against scans of the original English books and corrected thousands of mistakes and variants. Also, I have finally proofread the essays from 1904 through 1918, so everything in this collection was proofed against the books or proofread at least once.

But then, I felt the need to re-proof some books….
Most of the books were released at least twice by the Hogarth Press in Woolf’s lifetime: after the first edition they saw, from 1929 on, a second publication in the so-called Uniform Edition. The sheets were usually photo-offset from the first edition, and some mistakes were corrected (The bibliography states several times that “re-impressions are incorrectly described as a ‘New Edition’”, but they often are, in fact, new. Thanks to Julia Briggs for the info.). Some books were, entirely reset, released for a third or fourth time after her death, often repunctuated by Leonard Woolf. As the process of correcting mistakes in photo-offset editions was quite complicated, I’d argue that it must have been Virginia Woolf herself who demanded these changes, and therefore those second-edition texts have the most authority. This is why I procured scans of the 2nd editions of Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One’s Own and the corrected(!) first edition of Flush* and proofed the texts again. The texts of Mrs. Dalloway’s Party were proofed again against its first edition (they were from the The Complete Shorter Fiction before).

Additionally, I have fully compared the texts of To the Lighthouse, Orlando, Jacob's Room, The Waves, and A Haunted House with alternative editions. I have documented variants in the texts (all of them for first editions and the substantive ones of posthumous editions), but, as most of you might not be interested in them, they are hidden in the code and can be made visible if you delete “display: none; ” in the stylesheet specifications for the <ins> element (doing so would also let you see possible emendations). For variants of the first edition of Mrs. Dalloway I have relied on the notes of the Cambridge Edition of the novel, for those of the first two editions of The Common Reader on The Essays. The first editions of The Voyage Out, Night and Day, The Waves, The Common Reader: Second Series and The Years are identical to the second editions. Also, there were no changes in the posthumous second edition of Three Guineas. I could not yet check the first Jacob’s Room edition (I tried, but it wasn’t allowed to make scans of the badly aged book), so I guess I will wait for the Cambridge Edition to be released.

18 new letters were published in Congenial Spirits. The Selected Letters of V.W. (Hogarth Press, 1989). These are incorporated now into the main body of the letters. I have not tried to locate the restored passages in the Congenial Spirits letters that were left out in The Letters of V.W., because they only contain gossip.

I have re-proofed the stories against the corrected and revised 1989 edition of The Complete Shorter Fiction and added the incomplete stories and sketches from the appendices. Substantive variants between these versions and those from A Haunted House are documented in the code of the latter. The texts of “The Introduction” and “Ancestors” in Mrs. Dalloway’s Party and of Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble vary too heavily from the Shorter Fiction texts to record variant readings in the code, so you’ll find both versions for each.

Virginia Woolf had me fooled with naming two different essays “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” One was published in the New York Evening Post Literary Review on November 17, 1923, while the second, originally named “Character in Fiction” in The Criterion in July 1924, was re-released as a pamphlet titled Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. I had the same essay under two titles in this collection before, and have now added the first “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and deleted “Character in Fiction.”

In order to make this collection quotable, I have added the page numbers for all books except The Letters of V.W., as these are already numbered and easy to find. Again, assuming most readers don’t care for page numbers, I have hidden them in the code, so they only show if you delete “display: none; ” for the <del> element.——I know, I know, for full “quotability” this internet epub thingie lacks the necessary authority, but I still think they could help.

One more thing: I was quite surprised, when borrowing the first edition of Three Guineas from my library, to find a short intro text on the dust jacket flap. I then found out that, from A Room of One’s Own on, all first editions of Woolf’s books had these intros. I could find them all and transcribed them: you’ll find the texts collected in a new section at the end of the epub. For many dust jackets I had only low-resolution images, so there are some words I couldn’t decipher.

That’s it. It pains me to say it, as I don’t really want to let go of working on this collection, but this might indeed be finished now. Perhaps I’ll try to research single letters published in magazines, but there’s not much left to do.

Best regards,
pynch.


* After discovering incorrect dates in the second edition of Flush in November 1933, Virginia and Leonard borrowed a time machine from H.G. Wells, travelled back to October 1933 and corrected the sheets for the first edition. Read all about it in Thomas Pynchon’s forthcoming novel, The Chums of Chance and the British Poetess.