If you have ever wanted to review details of the changes Virginia Woolf made in the
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.
