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

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

Interest in and influence of this work apart [from] these revisions have an especial poignancy when one recalls (v. Quentin Bell) that the conclusion and final correction of the text of 'The Voyage Out' led immediately to Virginia Woolf's first literary breakdown, nearly ending at its beginning the career of the greatest female novelist of the 20th century.

This, then, appeared to be the copy from which the Doran edition was set and the missing corrected text many had been seeking.(2) Unfortunately, it was sold before scholars had a chance to study it, and its location was not known. It disappeared. When the editor of the recent Hogarth edition of The Voyage Out contacted Bow Windows and asked for the location of this text, Bow Windows explained to her that it "was part of a lot which came from family sources and was sold to an American bookseller who went out of business not long after, and no record of his name has been found."(3)

Since it was important to inspect this revised text before the publication of the Shakespeare Head Press edition of The Voyage Out,(4) I determined to locate it and discover, as far as was possible, its place in the history of Woolf's revisions. Using ExLibris, a forum for rare-book and bibliographic professionals on the Internet, I began a search that lasted several months. First, with the help of rare-book librarians in Canada and the United State, I was able to find the bookseller with whom Bow Windows had dealt. Though he was a bit surprised to discover that he had gone "out of business," he was extraordinarily helpful. He revealed that he had acquired this copy of the annotated Duckworth 1915 copy of The Voyage Out on consignment from Bow Windows in 1976, since he thought he had a buyer for it in California. When the prospective buyer had a chance to inspect the text, he discovered that it was not what the advertisement had led him to believe it might be, and he returned it to the bookseller in Chicago, who then returned it to Bow Windows.

Armed with this information, I called Bow Windows and learned that this text was finally sold to The Rare Books Special Collections at the University of Sydney Library. When contacted by phone, the staff at the library was immediately helpful and entirely candid about all aspects of this text. Mr. Neil Boness of the library sent me clear photocopies of all pages that contained typed or holographic alterations. He then went over each mark on every page with me over the phone, establishing such things as ink colors and other marks or annotations. This was especially important, since the Sydney annotated copy of The Voyage Out was clearly not what scholars had hoped or assumed it might be. It also became apparent that nearly everything in the Bow Windows catalogue description was wrong.(5)

The Sydney copy does not provide answers to all of our questions about Woolf's intentions for the American edition of The Voyage Out, but it does put several speculations to rest. First, while the typed revisions that are tipped in on pages 254, 256, 259, 261,262, 264, and 266 could be carbons in Adams, they appear to be originals. The tipped-in slips in the Sydney copy, however, are almost certainly carbons. They exhibit the ink-dispersal patterns of carbon paper, and they are all exact copies of what is found in Adams - right down to line endings and typos.