You can read Mendelson’s essay on the TLS site if you have a subscription. Or read the PDF he shared with the VWoolf Listserv.
As Mendelson writes: “Woolf’s revision to the chapter gone wrong occurs in the middle of a paragraph where Bernard remembers a visit he tried to make to Rhoda and Louis when they were lovers sharing a flat. He begins by imagining Rhoda’s awkwardness with the tea-kettle and staring out over the slate roofs. As he arrives at the door, fantasizing about Rhoda, the unrevised text reads:
She paned the curtain to look at the night. ‘Away!’ she said. ‘The moor is dark beneath the moon’ (I knocked and waited) and then perhaps told him some story, for instance, of women in Holborn wearing false noses – she had seen them. How lovely is the privacy of those to whom the world has given so much strife! I waited. Louis perhaps poured out milk in a saucer for the cat; Louis, whose bony hands shut like the sides of a dock closing themselves with a slow anguish of effort upon an enormous tumult of waters, who knew what has been said by the Egyptian, the Indian, by men with high cheek-bones and solitaries in hair shirts! Then taking a fine nib and dipping it in red ink, proceeds to rule straight lines for this infinitely various, vagulous, uncharted and unsounded life. I rang; I waited. And Rhoda flings wide the window and cries ‘Away! The moor is dark beneath the moon. The gathering winds will call the darkness soon.’ I knocked: I waited; there was no answer.”
Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His new book, The Inner Life of Mrs Dalloway, will be published in September, along with his new edition of Mrs. Dalloway.
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Beautiful