A copy of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, with notes by the author, has turned up in Australia.
The book was mistakenly shelved in a scientific collection at the University of Sydney and is now available. The revisions give an account of her approach to the complex modern subjectivity.
One of only two copies of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, End of a Journey (1915), with annotations in her handwriting and preparations to revise it for an American edition, has recently been rediscovered in the Fisher Library Rare Books Collection at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Acquired in the late 1970s, it had been misfiled with the science books in the rare books collection. Simon Cooper, metadata services officer, found it in 2021 and immediately realized the value of its discovery.
The Sydney copy, the only one available to the public, has been digitized. It is available online, and allows scholars and readers to study and consider Woolf’s editorial interventions.
Journey’s End follows Rachel Vinrace and a group of disparate characters as they embark on her father’s ship bound for South America. Woolf’s story addresses self-discovery and satirizes Edwardian life.
The novel nearly ended her writing career. The author struggled for years with drafts, until she abandoned the first version in 1912. It was titled Melymbrosia, after the food of the Greek gods. Woolf’s ideas on colonialism, women’s suffrage and gender relations were considered too dangerous for a first-time novelist.
Over the next three years she composed the novel (retitled) we have today, published by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth in London in 1915. At this crucial time, she began to write her diary and suffered a major mental breakdown, losing the rest of the year to illness.
In preparation for the first American edition of the novel, published by George H. Doran in New York in 1920, Woolf undertook a series of revisions of her text. Two copies of the first British edition of the novel contain evidence of this process, with Woolf’s handwritten annotations and fragments of typed pages pasted into each book.
Why revise?
What motivated Woolf to revise her text? She made revisions in the wake of her nervous breakdown, and after her literary career revived with her second novel, Night and Day, published in 1919.
Scholars have suggested that Woolf wished to put some distance between her own psychological tensions and the anguish of her main character, Rachel Vinrace. Both Woolf and her protagonist had dominant father figures, had lost their mothers at a relatively young age, and had not received a formal education, but had been educated at home. Exposing her character’s mental life so starkly caused Woolf some discomfort. A new edition may have given her the opportunity to reconsider.
It is a plausible theory. But do Woolf’s corrections confirm it? There are two main places in the text where most of the changes are indicated: both are crucial moments in the narrative.
The first set of changes occurs in Chapter XVI, where the conversation between Vinrace and Terence Hewet-the couple who occupy the novel’s romantic plot line-is altered to reduce access to Rachel’s inner thoughts. Entire paragraphs are replaced with typed text pasted directly onto the page, where the narrator studies Rachel without the guarantee of understanding her.
This has the effect of diluting some awkward autobiographical elements of the text, but it also marks a significant change in the way the narrative accesses the characters’ minds.
The narrator is constrained by the character’s own limits: the depths of Rachel’s subjectivity are unknown even to her. This bears the mark of modern psychology and Freud’s theory of the unconscious, in the years leading up to and during the novel’s composition.
Virginia Woolf’s Rare Novel
A modernist revolution
This innovation signals a profound change in modernist fiction, which began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional forms of writing.
The impenetrability of Woolf’s characters starts from the dark regions of the mind. We are no longer in the realm of realism, where thoughts and actions are knowable (and often conveyed by an omniscient narrator). Instead the narrator provides a portrait of the complex modern person, who responds to the world in not entirely reasonable ways.
The other significant set of revisions in the Sydney text arises in Chapter XXV, in which Rachel and Terence attempt to navigate the future of their budding relationship, which also marks Rachel’s descent into fever and her decline, which ends in death.
The long passages are marked for deletion (although none were actually deleted in the first U.S. edition). They largely concern Rachel’s feverish awareness and Terence’s attitudes toward romantic love and its effects on an artistic life.
Virginia Woolf may also have wanted to put distance between the narrator and the intimate thoughts of her characters, invoking instead a space of ambiguity, where words and gestures are to be interpreted by readers rather than analyzed in full light by a knowing narrative consciousness.
Woolf’s first novel straddles the conventions of realism inherited from the nineteenth century and the new experimental fiction of the twentieth. The Sydney text tells an important part of this story.
It illuminates the development of Woolf’s technique and her evolution toward the free indirect style for which she became famous in later novels such as Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves.
Woolf was at the center of the revolution in novelistic form during the modernist era. The proof is in her annotated copy of Journey’s End.