Collected Works Woolf, Virginia: Complete Works | v.11.1 | Update 6 Feb 2024

[pynch]

Proofed The Voyage Out against the 1949 Hogarth Press edition and corrected about 380 mistakes and variants.

Proofed Night and Day against the 1919 Duckworth edition and corrected about 620 mistakes and variants.

Proofed Orlando against the 1954 Hogarth Press edition and corrected about 330 mistakes and variants.

Proofed A Room of One’s Own against the 1929 Hogarth Press edition and corrected about 230 mistakes and variants.

Proofed The London Scene against the 1982 Random House edition and corrected about 15 mistakes.

Proofed The Years against the 1958 Hogarth Press edition and corrected about 170 mistakes.

Proofed Three Guineas against the 1943 Hogarth Press edition and corrected about 670 mistakes and variants.

Proofed Freshwater against the 1976 Hogarth Press edition and corrected about 60 mistakes and variants.

Proofed The Complete Shorter Fiction (including the Mrs Dalloway’s Party texts) against the 1985 Hogarth Press edition, “A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus” against the 1987 edition, and corrected about 100 mistakes and variants.

Please let me know if you find any mistakes in these texts.

[doubleshuffle]

[pynch]

I have added the first two volumes of her letters, The Flight of the Mind and The Question of Things Happening, covering the years 1888 through 1922, and A Passionate Apprentice with the early journals 1887–1909. 31 additional letters which surfaced later in magazines have also been added.

I guess this is indeed complete now.

[sein]

Thank you so much!

[pynch]

You’re very welcome.

[parvetaja]

Bless you! I registered as a user just to say I'm incredibly thankful to you. I found "A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus", which I had been looking for everywhere, thanks to you! I can now translate it into an obscure little hyperborean language. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

[parvetaja]

Oh, and, not to complain, as this kind of stuff happens all the time and is admirably rare in your document, but since you did ask: I found a typo (or a scan-o):
"Such a flame as that in the monk’s eye⁠[,] though it had wandered in obscure places since, and had shone upon the barren hill side and among the stones and the stunted little trees⁠[,] had been lit once at the original hearth; and doubtless it will bum on still in the head of monk or peasant when more ages are passed than the brain can number."
I am pretty sure it should be "burn".

[pynch]

Welcome to MobileRead, parvetaja, and thanks for reporting the mistake.
There’s another one in the following sentence, by the way:
“Rather is it not true, as fancy hints in the dark and the pallid dawn, that just so many shapes of beauty swam in the vague for thought to realise as the Greeks circled with stone and with language, and that nothing is left for us but to worship in silence or if we choose, to chum the empty air?”
It should read “churn,” of course.

There’s a major revision of this collection underway, with improved texts, some new letters, and other bells and whistles, so check back soon. It should go online in two or three weeks, depending on some books I’m still waiting for.

[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.

[Nick Payne]

I just downloaded the v11 collected works and sideloaded it via Calibre 2.81 onto my Kobo Aura HD running firmware 4.3.8945. When I try to open the ebook on the Kobo, the screen blanks for half a dozen seconds and the ereader then reboots. Same thing happens if I try opening it again after the reboot.

I can open the downloaded epub on the PC with either the reader built into Calibre or with Sigil without any problem, and if I ask Sigil to check the epub for errors, none are found. Haven't had a similar problem with any other ebook I have on the reader, but none of them are remotely as large as this one.

[pynch]

Sorry, but I have no idea what’s happening there, I’ve never heard of a similar problem with the Woolf before.

[Nick Payne]

I don't know what is causing the problem either. But I used the Calibre EpubSplit plugin to save each of the novels out of the complete works epub as a separate epub, sent those ebooks to the Kobo, and I can open them without any problem.

[Nick Payne]

Well, I performed a factory reset on my eReader, reloaded all the ebooks from my Calibre library, and I can now open and read the complete works without any problem.

[pynch]

Thanks for the update. Glad to hear it’s solved.

[khoogeland]

I love this. Thanks so much. I was waiting on the letters finally being digitized. And here I am, just a little late to the party. Thank you so much for all your hard work on this.