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Archive for the ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ Category

Celebrating 100 years of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Posted in books, Mrs. Dalloway, tagged , , , , on Wednesday 14 May 2025| Leave a Comment »

Today, May 14, marks the centenary of Virginia Woolf’s celebrated 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, with 1,500 copies sold within a month of its publication.

A reader favorite

Woolf’s fourth novel, set on a single day in the middle of June in 1923, elicited a variety of responses after its publication.

As Mark Hussey explains in Virginia Woolf A to Z (1995), the novel has not only held the attention of critics over the years, but “with To the Lighthouse, has probably generated more commentary than any other of Wolf’s fictions” (175).

The novel, lauded for its use of interior monologue, as well as its poetic language, is a reader favorite. It is certainly one I have picked up and read at various stages of my life during the last 50 years, always finding some new insight into Clarissa, along with some new connections between Clarissa’s thoughts and life and my own.

Links to follow in celebration of the centenary

Here are some links to articles and events noting this milestone, thanks to Vara Neverow, professor of English at Connecticut State University and editor of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany.

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Get three Vintage Woolf Classics with Hogarth Press covers

Posted in A Room of One's Own, books, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , on Sunday 11 May 2025| 1 Comment »

If you have always wanted to own a Virginia Woolf work with an original Hogarth Press cover design, you are in luck — if you live in the UK or Europe.

Penguin’s Vintage Classics series now includes three Woolf works, including Mrs. Dalloway, with the original Hogarth Press covers designed by her artist sister, Vanessa Bell, in celebration of the 1925 novel’s centenary.

About the Virginia Woolf Gift Classics

Mrs. Dalloway is part of a special three-volume hardback set that also includes A Room of One’s Own (1929) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Each edition features an original cover with gilt-printed boards beneath.

All three book covers in the Virginia Woolf Gift Classics maintain the distinctly hand-rendered shapes and the textural grain of analogue printmaking that the Hogarth Press employed — including the “imperfections” of the originals.

The process and the prices

To create the final replica covers, multiple covers of the originals were scanned and pieced together.

Because of challenges raised by the original sizes of the spines, “these are not facsimile editions but we have made reference to the first editions in every detail of the design and production, from the typeface used in the typesetting, to the choice of paper, to the colour of the cover boards,” explained Charlotte Knight, editorial director at Vintage Classics.

The volumes are available for £24.42 each on the Penguin UK website. The set of three is currently priced at £54. Delivery is only available to the UK and Europe.

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Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the color purple — as in ink

Posted in 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Hogarth Press, Mark Hussey, Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours, tagged , , , , , , on Friday 11 April 2025| 3 Comments »

I have written about Virginia Woolf and fountain pens and her ink preferences before. But today I learned of a new discovery that links Woolf even more strongly to the everyday work of the Hogarth Press, thanks to her use of purple ink.

First page of The Hours notebook 2 (purple ink). Courtesy of SP Books

Nicola Wilson of the University of Reading and the Modernist Archives Publishing Project, a digital project that debuted at the 2017 Woolf Conference and focuses on the Hogarth Press, posted this note to the VWoolf Listserv:

We have recently found evidence of Woolf’s purple pen in the Hogarth Press archives up to Feb 1940 – on the stock cards! Taking account of the figures? This is very exciting as it gives a real indication of Woolf’s presence at the Press and corroborates the kind of information on figures she tracks in the diaries.

Purple ink and the Hogarth Press

Esther Folkersma made the discovery while working with Danni Corfield to clean, sort, and organize the Hogarth Press stock cards as part of her research internship with MAPP.  The Hogarth Press stock cards indicate where the stock of a specific book was being held, when the entity received the stock and how many copies they received, how many copies were issued, the number of copies printed at what date, the number of bound copies, and the balance in sheets.

“As more and more purple appeared under our sponges, brushes, and scalpels, and as the colours became more pronounced, Woolf’s presence in these cards grew,” Folkersma wrote in a post on the MAPP blog.

“The scale of Woolf’s handwriting in these stock cards surprised me, as her presence in the press, at least in a material sense, is often difficult to find, even though the significance of her role in the press has always been undeniable, especially as seen through her own diary entries.”

Folkersma explains that “the abundance of Virginia Woolf’s purple ink readily found on a majority of the Stock Value Cards illustrates her involvement in the press to an extent beyond what I had even gathered from her diaries. These very utilitarian cards show how involved Woolf was in the more administrative operations behind the scenes.”

Purple ink and The Hours (Mrs. Dalloway)

According to Mark Hussey, Bloomsbury scholar and author, “most of The Hours (‘Mrs Dalloway‘) holograph is in Woolf’s favored purple ink, with some in black and a little in blue. Her corrections on the American proof are also in purple ink.”

In 2019, SP Books published a gorgeous edition of the handwritten manuscript of what would become Woolf’s famous 1925 novel, allowing anyone who could obtain a copy to see that many of the pages were written in purple ink. I did and wrote a post about it.

Purple ink a chapter, a letter, and a diary entry

Folkersma also recommends reading Ted Bishop’s chapter “Getting a Hold on Haddock: Virginia Woolf?s Inks” from Virginia Woolf and the World of Books (2018), the selected papers from the 2017 conference.

And she mentions two Woolf quotes — one from a letter and one from a diary

This ink is Waterman?s fountain pen ink. Cheap, violet, indelible. (Which sounds as if I were paid to write their advertisements). – from a 1923 letter to Dorothy Brett

The degradation of steel pens is such that after doing my best to clip & file one into shape, I have to take to a Waterman, profoundly though I distrust them, & disbelieve in the capacity to convey the nobler & profounder thoughts.” – from a 1918 Diary entry

Roundtable participants at the 2017 Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf sit below a screen showing a digitized ledger sheet from the Hogarth Press. Note the purple ink.

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Comparing four editions of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Posted in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf online, tagged , , , , , on Sunday 2 February 2025| 1 Comment »

If you have ever wanted to review details of the changes Virginia Woolf made in the various editions of Mrs. Dalloway, they are now available for free online, thanks to the efforts of Edward Mendelson of New York’s Columbia University.

On his webpage, “Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway: Texts and Scanned Images,” Mendelson provides links to searchable scanned PDF images of four early printings of Mrs. Dalloway and to PDF documents containing the texts of those editions.

The four early printings include:

  • Two editions of Woolf’s novel that were published on the same day, May 14, 1925 — the British edition by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, with a dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell and the American edition by Harcourt, Brace & Company, with the same Vanessa Bell just jacket;
  • the second impression of the British edition, published by the Hogarth Press in September 1925;
  • the third impression of the British edition (the “Uniform Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf”), published by the Hogarth Press in September 1929 and reprinted without change in 1933; and
  • the Introduction to the Modern Library reprint of the American edition, dated June 1928.

Mendelson scanned the four textually-significant editions of Mrs. Dalloway listed above and posted the scans, together with texts extracted from the scans, on his site. Also on the site is a PDF that compares the texts of the first American and first British editions. Mendelson claims it is “easy to see the differences within the text, rather than by consulting a table of variants.”

The page also includes notes on Virginia Woolf’s revisions in the later Hogarth printings, and some notes on the texts of current editions.

Mendelson notes that “the scans are of less than ideal quality” because he is a first-time book scanner using lower quality scanning equipment and the battered and damaged copies of the early editions that he found affordable.

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“Dalloway: Summer at Bourton” staged free Oct. 20 in NYC

Posted in Mrs. Dalloway, play, tagged , on Saturday 19 October 2024| Leave a Comment »

A workshop presentation of the play Dalloway: Summer at Bourton, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, will be staged at 3 p.m. on Oct. 20 in the 6BC Botanical Garden, 624 E. 6th St. on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

The play imagines the fateful weekend that the characters experience 35 years before the main events of the novel. It explores the time when Clarissa meets Richard, refuses Peter’s proposal, and shares a kiss with Sally Seton. The garden was chosen as the site for the staging since much of the action at Bourton happens outside in the gardens.

Lindsay Joelle wrote the play and Olivia Facini directs it. Admission is free. The play runs from 3 – 4:30 p.m. and doors open at 2:30 p.m. RSVP and get more details at Eventbrite.

In the case of inclement weather, the presentation will move to New Georges’ The Room (520 8th Ave, third floor).

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