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Newly discovered Woolf proofs now available online

Posted in Orlando, The Waves, Woolf online, tagged , , , , on Sunday 7 September 2025| Leave a Comment »

A screenshot of the title page of the scanned Common Reader: Second Series

Edward Mendelson of Columbia University has shared scanned images of three sets of proofs newly discovered in Columbia’s library. They include two Virginia Woolf novels, as well as an edition of The Common Reader: Second Series.

These invaluable resources are available on Mendelson’s web page — where he has shared his scanned proofs of other Woolf novels. The new scans include the following:

  1. The corrected proofs sent to Harcourt, Brace of  The Waves (1931) “in which the multicolored revisions on p. 301 are a sight to behold,” according to Mendelson. He notes that the page contains links to scanned PDF images of the proofs and early printings of The Waves and to PDF documents containing the texts of those editions, extracted from the scanned images. This page also includes notes on the text and on existing editions of the novel.
  2. The corrected proofs sent to Harcourt, Brace of The Common Reader: Second Series (1932). Scanned images of the marked proofs sent to Harcourt, Brace from the Columbia University Library.
  3. The uncorrected proofs sent to Harcourt, Brace of Orlando (1928), with some index entries added in an unknown hand. Scanned images of the proofs sent to Harcourt, Brace of Orlando from the Columbia University Library. Mendelson notes that Virginia or Leonard Woolf removed the leaf with the list of illustrations (pp. 13-14) before sending these proofs.

More Woolf scans from Mendelson

Mendelson has provided scans of other Woolf works.

More on The Waves

You can also read about Mendelson’s take on “the chapter gone wrong” in The Waves.

Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His new book, The Inner Life of Mrs Dalloway, is out this month from Columbia University Press, along with Mrs. Dalloway: The First-Edition Text with the Author’s Revisions, edited by Mendelson and published by New York Review Bookshis new edition of Mrs. Dalloway.

A screenshot of pg. 1 of the comparison of the first American edition and the first British edition of The Waves.

A page in Woolf’s first notebook in which she penned a draft of The Waves

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Exploring Woolf’s “chapter gone wrong” in The Waves

Posted in novels, The Waves, tagged , , on Thursday 31 July 2025| 1 Comment »

Edward Mendelson shares a July 25 piece he wrote for The Times Literary Supplement on Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves (1931). Titled “Breaking The Waves: How Virginia Woolf Righted ‘one chapter gone wrong’,” the essay explores how the various corrected proofs of her manuscript fail to solve the textual mystery of what she calls the “chapter gone wrong.”

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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