Virginia Woolf's revisions of The 'Voyage Out': some new evidence

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1996 by James M. Haule

Virginia Stephen began writing The Voyage Out when she was 25, and was still working on it when she married Leonard Woolf in 1912. She revised the proofs of her first novel in 1913, but The Voyage Out was not published by her half-brother's firm, Gerald Duckworth and Company, until 26 March 1915. Leonard Woolf explained that publication was "held up for the two years because of Virginia's breakdown."(1) Woolf was ill again just as The Voyage Out was due to be published, and she was taken to a nursing home on 25 March 1915. How much the extensive revisions of her first novel might have contributed to her illness is uncertain, but it is clear that The Voyage Out went through a number of revisions since 1908, when she gave her brother-in-law Clive Bell several chapters of her first draft to read. With the possible exception of The Years (1937), none of her novels was as long in preparation or more difficult for her to complete.

Virginia Woolf saw reason to revise the novel again in the winter of 1919-20, after she received an offer from Macmillan to publish it in New York. This proved impossible when Macmillan could not accept the terms that Duckworth and Company imposed. By November, however, another offer to publish the novel in America was advanced by the George H. Doran Company, which also wished to publish her second novel, Night and Day. Since Doran proposed to reset the text, Woolf still had an opportunity to revise the novel as thoroughly as she wished.

In January of 1920, there was also consideration given to a second Duckworth edition. This proposed revised edition would give Woolf a chance to make any number of changes and corrections to the text. Woolf took this opportunity seriously, writing to Saxon Sydney-Turner on 25 January 1920 and asking if he could

once more tell me the number of the Beethoven sonata that Rachel plays in Voyage Out - I sent the copy I marked to America, and now they're bringing out a new edition here - I can't remember what you told me - I say op. 112 - It can't be that. (Letters #1115)

As it turned out, Duckworth did not issue a revised edition on its own, but instead bought sheets from Doran and used them for its next printing of the novel in September 1920.

The history of the composition of Woolf's first novel is important for artistic reasons, but it is also a unique instance. At no other time in her life did Woolf revise substantially a published novel, especially at the distance of several years from initial publication. She was a different writer in 1920 than she was in 1915. She published Night and Day and Kew Gardens in 1919. Monday or Tuesday would appear in 1921; Jacob's Room was begun in the spring of 1920 and published in 1922. By the time of her 1920 revision, her work was being published by the Hogarth Press, which she and Leonard owned and controlled. In short, she was now an accomplished author far from the style of The Voyage Out who had complete control over all aspects of the composition and publication of her work.

In order to revise the first English edition of The Voyage Out for publication in America, Woolf secured copies of the 1915 Duckworth edition and made changes directly in the text, finally sending the heavily corrected book to Doran for publication. One copy of that annotated edition has been known to exist for some time. Called the "Adams Copy," since it is part of the library of Mr. F. B. Adams, it contains numerous ink deletions and corrections in Woolf's own hand, as well as a number of extensive changes that were first typed out and then cut and pasted into the text. This copy also contains blue-pencil typesetter's marks that indicate at the very least a careful preparation of the text for publication. However, since these page layout instructions were not always followed exactly in the Doran edition, and since there are other minor but obvious differences between Adams and Doran, some scholars assumed that another annotated text must have been the source of the Doran edition.

This theory gained added credibility when a sale catalogue (No. 76) of the Bow Windows Book Shop in 1976 carried the following item (#266):

THE AUTHOR'S MASTER COPY OF HER FIRST BOOK. With her signature on the front fly leaf (slightly offset onto paste down), and extensive revisions to the text by her for the printing of the first American edition of 1920. Occurring mostly in chapter XVI the revisions are either in the author's hand or consist of typed slips pasted over the existing text, with some crayoned or inked deletions, &c. Involving more than 100 lines of type and 12 different pages the alterations include a 5-line one in the author's own hand on p. 265.

This copy is evidently the original from which the printers' copy for the second edition was made, see Kirkpatrick Ala & b and the illustration at p. 3 which although similar to that in our copy is by no means identical indicating that our copy was in fact retained by Virginia Woolf in order to ensure that the printer complied with her instructions in the new edition projected. No further revisions to subsequent editions are known.