One of two copies of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, ‘End of the Journey’, from 1915, with annotations within the writer’s personal handwriting, has been discovered on the University of Sydney. The Sydney copy is the one one accessible to the general public and permits each students and readers to think about the writer’s editorial annotations. 1915 novel was revealed and retitled by his stepbrother
One of solely two copies of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, Voyage’s End (1915), with annotations in her handwriting and preparations to revise it for an American version, has lately been rediscovered within the Fisher Library Rare Books Collection on the University of Sydney, Australia.
Acquired within the late Nineteen Seventies, it had been mistakenly filed with the science books within the uncommon e book assortment. Simon Cooper, an officer at Metadata Services, discovered it in 2021 and instantly understood the worth of his discovery.
The Sydney situation, the one one accessible to the general public, has been digitized. It is on the market on-line, and permits students and readers to check and think about Woolf’s editorial interventions.
The novel nearly ended her writing profession
‘Voyage’s End’ follows Rachel Vinrace and a gaggle of disparate characters who embark on her father’s ship headed for South America. Woolf’s story offers with self-discovery and satirises Edwardian life.
The novel practically ended her writing profession. The writer needed to wrestle for years with the drafts, till she deserted the primary model in 1912. It was titled Melymbrosia, after the meals of the Greek gods. Woolf’s concepts on colonialism, girls’s suffrage, and gender relations had been thought-about too harmful for a starting novelist.
Over the subsequent three years he composed the (retitled) novel We Have Today, revealed by his half-brother Gerald Duckworth in London in 1915. At this significant second, he started writing his diary and suffered a significant psychological breakdown, lacking the remainder of the 12 months to sickness.
To put together the primary American version of the novel, revealed by George H. Doran in New York in 1920, Woolf undertook a sequence of revisions to its textual content. Two copies of the primary British version of the novel comprise proof of this course of, with Woolf’s handwritten annotations and typed web page fragments pasted into every e book.
Why assessment?
What motivated Woolf to revise his textual content? She made revisions within the aftermath of her nervous breakdown, and after her literary profession was revived together with her second novel, Night and Day, revealed in 1919.
Scholars have steered that Woolf wished to place a ways between her personal psychological stresses and the anguish of her fundamental character, Rachel Vinrace. Both Woolf and her protagonist had domineering father figures, had misplaced their moms at a comparatively younger age, and had not obtained a proper training, as an alternative being educated at house. Exposing the psychological lifetime of her character so starkly precipitated Woolf some discomfort. A brand new version could have given him an opportunity to rethink.
It is a believable concept. But do Woolf’s corrections affirm this? There are two fundamental locations within the textual content the place a lot of the modifications are indicated: each are pivotal moments within the narrative.
The first set of modifications happens in Chapter XVI, the place the dialog between Vinrace and Terence Hewet, the couple who occupy the novel’s romantic story line, is altered to cut back entry to Rachel’s interior ideas. Entire paragraphs are changed with typewritten textual content pasted instantly on the web page, the place the narrator research Rachel with no assure of understanding her.
This has the impact of diluting some uncomfortable autobiographical components of the textual content, however it additionally marks a major shift in the way in which the narrative accesses the minds of the characters.
The narrator is constrained by the character’s personal limits: the depths of Rachel’s subjectivity are unknown even to her. This bears the mark of contemporary psychology and Freud’s concept of the unconscious, within the years earlier than and throughout the novel’s composition.
A modernist revolution
This innovation marks a profound shift in modernist fiction, which started within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is characterised by a self-conscious break with conventional methods of writing.
The impenetrability of Woolf’s characters stems from the darkish areas of the thoughts. We are now not within the realm of realism, the place ideas and actions are knowable (and infrequently conveyed by an omniscient narrator). Instead the narrator offers a portrait of the advanced trendy particular person, who responds to the world in methods that aren’t completely affordable.
The different important set of revisions within the Sydney textual content is available in Chapter XXV, wherein Rachel and Terence attempt to navigate the way forward for their budding relationship, which additionally marks Rachel’s descent into fever and decline, ending in dying.
Long passages are marked for deletion (though none had been really deleted within the first American version). They deal largely with Rachel’s feverish consciousness and Terence’s attitudes towards romantic love and its results on a creative life.
Woolf might also have needed to place distance between the narrator and the interior ideas of his characters, invoking as an alternative an area of ambiguity, the place phrases and gestures are to be interpreted by readers moderately than scrutinized within the full mild by a understanding narrative consciousness.
Woolf’s first novel straddles the conventions of realism inherited from the nineteenth century and the brand new experimental fiction of the twentieth. The Sydney textual content tells an essential a part of this story.
It illuminates the event of Woolf’s method and its evolution into the free oblique type for which she grew to become well-known in later novels comparable to Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves.
Woolf was on the heart of the revolution of the novel kind throughout the age of modernism. The proof is in your annotated copy of Voyage’s End.
*This article has been revealed in ‘The Conversation’. You can learn the unique right here.
Mark Byron. Professor, University of Sydney.
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