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

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

The seller of this copy may have had good reason (if not hard evidence) to believe that Woolf in fact retained it for her own record. More than likely, Woolf kept it because she wanted a copy of her most extensive changes, but not of all the corrections to the first English edition. With the exception of the unique deletions in violet ink that begin on page 421 (which we will inspect in a moment) and a minor change on page 264, the Sydney copy records only part of the revisions to the text made in the Adams copy. Pages 263 and 264 also reveal another interesting feature of the Adams and Sydney copies: off-setting ink marks that had to be the result of turning pages (or closing the book) before the emendations on pages 262 and 265 had entirely dried. This could indicate that Woolf was working quickly. Woolf could have been copying changes, not composing them. This she might do if, for example, she had a list of changes in front of her, and she was attempting to record them fairly rapidly, first in one copy and then in the other. Though the sequence of these revisions may never be determined with certainty, a close inspection of the holograph changes in both the Adams and the Sydney copies demonstrates the likelihood that both were done at about the same time. Not only are the tipped-in slips in the Sydney copy carbons of the originals in the Adams, but also the ink and pen nib marks in both copies are identical.

It should also be noted that there was some discussion of another revised edition of The Voyage Out for the American market. In 1925, Donald Brace wrote to Woolf asking if there were any changes that she would like to see in the novel before it was reprinted. On 22 November Woolf wrote in reply:

You say you are now re-printing The Voyage Out. I do not think there are any alterations, as Doran printed from the second edition here, which I had corrected. I hope it will have some success.(7)

Woolf responded some time after Brace wrote to ask for changes, since she says in the same letter that she has "been ill and not able to write for some weeks." For whatever reason, therefore, Woolf is clearly content in 1925 to see the text of the Doran edition reprinted without further alteration.

What then are the deletions that are found only in the Sydney copy? Since they are in violet ink and are made with a pen nib different from the one used to produce the extensive changes in black ink elsewhere in both texts, it may be safe to assume that they were made at a different time than the other changes to Adams and Sydney. It is also clear that they represent a different vision of Chapter XXV than either published edition records. For this reason, they take on a special interest.

Chapter XXV is near the end of The Voyage Out. In it, Rachel becomes ill when out walking with Terence, complaining of the headaches that eventually lead to delirium and death. The Sydney copy records Woolf's intention to delete nearly everything from the top of page 421 through the paragraph that ends on the top of page 424. This is the section where Terence returns distraught to his room after a brief conversation with Nurse McInnis. Though it is not clear just where Woolf intended to begin deleting text, it appears that she wished to end the report of Terence's sense of "hostility and foreboding" with the statement that he "could not get used to his pain, it was a revelation to him." The deletion would be the rest of that paragraph: