The Years E-Book

Virginia Woolf

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Shakespeare Head Press Edition of Virginia Woolf
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 826

Beschreibung

This edition takes the first British edition of The Years as its copy-text, and includes a comprehensive introduction, extensive explanatory notes, and a full list of textual variants and editorial emendations. * Features a comprehensive introduction, detailing the lengthy process of the composition and revision of the novel, and its subsequent publication history * Includes extensive explanatory notes, highlighting the political, historical, social and literary contexts of the novel * Provides a full account of the variants between the first British and American editions, supplemented by a list of editorial emendations made in this present edition

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

The Shakespeare Head Press Edition of Virginia Woolf

Preface to the Edition

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Frontispiece: the dust-jacket for the first English edition

Introduction

1

2

3

4 The Text of The Years

1880

1891

1907

1908

1910

1911

1913

1914

1917

1918

PRESENT DAY

Appendix: Textual Variants and Emendations

The Shakespeare Head Press Edition of VIRGINIA WOOLF

To the LighthouseSusan DickThe WavesJames M. Haule and Philip H. Smith, JrNight and DayJ. H. StapeRoger FryDiane F. GillespieThe Voyage OutC. Ruth Miller and Lawrence MillerMrs DallowayMorris BejaFlushElizabeth SteeleOrlandoJ. H. StapeThree GuineasNaomi BlackBetween the ActsSusan Dick and Mary S. MillarJacob’s RoomEdward L. BishopThe YearsDavid Bradshaw and Ian BlythA Room of One’s Own    David Bradshaw and Stuart N. Clarke

Preface to the Edition

All but the first two of the books that Virginia Woolf wrote for publication during her lifetime were originally published by The Hogarth Press which she and Leonard Woolf founded. Why then do we need any more editions of all these works? There are two main reasons. First, the original English and American editions of her books, published in the majority of cases at the same time, often vary from each other because Virginia Woolf made different changes in them before they were printed. Secondly, many of the references or allusions in these works, which were written more than two generations ago now, have become increasingly obscure for contemporary readers.

The purpose of The Shakespeare Head Press Edition is to present reliable texts, complete with alternative readings and explanatory notes, of all the books she herself published or intended to publish, not just her novels. Only her collections of stories and essays have been omitted. These have been included in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, edited by Susan Dick, and The Essays of Virginia Woolf, edited by Andrew McNeillie. Also excluded from The Shakespeare Head Press Edition are Virginia Woolf’s letters and diaries, which have already been edited.

In the selection of texts, the edition is the first to take into account variants between the first English and the first American editions of Woolf’s works, as well as variants found in surviving proofs. Each text has been chosen after a computer-collation of the first editions. Where relevant the proofs have also been collated. Parts of works published separately (such as the earlier version of the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse) have been included in appendices along with other relevant documents (such as Woolf’s introduction to Mrs Dalloway).

Each text has an introduction giving the circumstances of the work’s composition, publication and reception, followed by a note on the text selected. Annotations, variants and emendations are included at the end of each volume. In the interests of pleasure in reading, the texts of the works are free of superscript numbers, asterisks, editorial brackets or other interventions.

‘So there are to be new editions of Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Meredith,’ Virginia Woolf wrote in her 1922 essay ‘On Re-reading Novels’. ‘Left on trains, forgotten in lodging-houses, thumbed and tattered to destruction, the old have served their day …’ It is our hope that The Shakespeare Head Press Edition of Virginia Woolf will inspire, as Woolf predicted those earlier editions of the writers she admired and re-read would do, both ‘new readings and new friends’.

This edition first published 2012

© 1937 The Estate of Virginia Woolf

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941.

The years / Virginia Woolf ; edited by David Bradshaw and Ian Blyth.

p. cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-631-17784-5

ISBN 978-1-118-23429-7 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-118-23428-0 (mobi)

1. Families—England—Fiction. 2. England—Social life and customs—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Bradshaw, David, 1955– editor. II. Blyth, Ian, editor. III. Title.

PR6045.O72Y4 2012

823'.912–dc23

2011047242

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Acknowledgements

The Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; Stuart N. Clarke; Karen Kukil, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Neilson Library, Smith College, Northampton, MA; Brigitte Lee Messenger; National Library of Scotland; University of Reading, Department of Special Collections; S. P. Rosenbaum; Anna Snaith. Our thanks to Stephen Barkway for supplying us with the photograph used as the frontispiece for this edition.

David Bradshaw and Ian Blyth

Abbreviations

All references to Woolf’s novels and other books are keyed to The Shakespeare Head Press Edition or to the first edition of the text in question.

The following abbreviations have been used in the Introduction and Notes:

B Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, rev. Adrian Room (London: Cassell, 1999). BA Between the Acts CH Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975; rep. 1997). CSF Virginia Woolf: The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick, rev. edn (London: Hogarth Press, 1989). DI–V The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1977–84). EI–VI The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke, 6 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1986–2011). F Flush G R. H. Gretton, A Modern History of the English People 1880–1922 (London: Martin Secker, 1930). Hyams          David Bradshaw, ‘Hyams Place: The Years, the Jews and the British Union of Fascists’, in Maroula Joannu (ed.), Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 179–91. JR Jacob’s Room LI–VI The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1975–80). LE Ben Weinreb, Christopher Hibbert, Julia Keay and John Keay (eds), The London Encyclopaedia, 3rd edn (London, Basingstoke and Oxford: Macmillan, 2008). MB Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Pimlico, 2002). MD Mrs Dalloway ND Night and Day P The Pargiters PA A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals and ‘Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches’, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (London: Pimlico, 2004). R Grace Radin, Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Years’: The Evolution of a Novel (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981). TG Three Guineas TL To the Lighthouse RN Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks, ed. Brenda Silver (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). VO The Voyage Out W The Waves Y The Years 

The dust-jacket for the first English edition, designed by Vanessa Bell.

Introduction

1

By the time The Years appeared in British and American bookshops (on 15 March and 8 April 1937 respectively) it had taken its toll on Woolf. No other novel had absorbed so much of her time and creative energy and none had involved so much frustration and mutation during the course of its emergence. She must have been all too acutely aware that its title reflected its protracted gestation as well as its portrait of an epoch. Woolf was all the more delighted, therefore, when it was generally well received by critics and became an immediate best seller, especially in America, while the long-standing tendency within the academy to underrate it as an over-long and retrograde exercise in conventional realism has been superseded during the last decade or so by a more nuanced appreciation of its depth, intricacy, ambition and patterning.

The twin source of both The Years and Three Guineas (1938) is a speech Woolf gave on 21 January 1931 to the London branch of the National Society for Women’s Service, an abridged version of which was subsequently published as ‘Professions for Women’.1 The day before she delivered it she wrote in her diary: ‘I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new book – a sequel to a Room of One’s Own – about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps – Lord how exciting!’2 In the event, it would be a further six years until this ‘new book’ saw the light of day and by that time it bore little resemblance to the daring and uninhibited text Woolf had envisaged in her bath, and not least, we may presume, because she knew that such frankness was then impossible in her prudish literary culture, where inhibition, evasion and concealment were enforced by law, though Woolf did go on to speak her mind with considerable forthrightness (while still avoiding explicit discussion of ‘the sexual life of women’) in Three Guineas. Although the eight-volume holograph draft of The Years in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library (more than a thousand notebook pages in all), reveals some evidence of the openness about sexual matters to which Woolf aspired at this time, only a few, oblique instances of this spirit found their way into the published text, whereas squeamishness and revulsion of one kind or another are to be found on page after page. But it would be unwise to conclude that the absence of frankness in The Years reveals a loss of nerve on Woolf’s part, a meek acceptance of what was and was not permissible: the unspeakable and the unspoken; the marginalized, the concealed and the excluded; the malignant, obligatory reticence of the patriarchal system, would become the driving concerns of her ninth novel. The inherent limitations of her women characters in particular, their struggles to leave behind the traits and prejudices of their families, are indicative of how domestic environments and domestic values leave indelible blots in The Years.

At the beginning of 1931 Woolf visualized her book as a kind of portal into new fictional territory and she was strongly tempted to make headway with it even as she struggled to finish The Waves. ‘Too much excited, alas, to get on with The Waves’, she wrote in her diary on 23 January. ‘One goes on making up The Open Door,3 or whatever it is to be called. The didactive demonstrative style conflicts with the dramatic: I find it hard to get back inside Bernard again.’4 She writes in the same diary entry of the ‘Open Door sucking at my brain’,5 recording with almost audible relief three days later: ‘Heaven be praised, I can truthfully say on this first day of being 49 that I have shaken off the obsession of Opening the Door, & have returned to the Waves’. Nevertheless, she aimed to have a ‘rough sketch of the Open Door’6 by 1 April. But this hope was not fulfilled, and by 28 May 1931 she noted that she was ‘much interrupted again by my wish to write A Knock on the door. For some weeks I have not thought of it. It suddenly forces itself on me, & I go on making up sentences, arguments, jokes &c.’7 By the beginning of the following year ‘the Tap on the Door’8 still hovered tantalizingly before her and 16 February 1932 found Woolf ‘quivering & itching to write my – whats it to be called? – “Men are like that?” – no thats too patently feminist: the sequel then, for which I have collected enough powder to blow up St Pauls.’9 By 1 April she mentions in a letter to Ethel Smyth that she has ‘invented the skeleton of another novel: but it must wait, buried, at least a year.’10

One of the most significant dates in the evolution of The Years is 11 October 1932. It was on this day that Woolf began ‘The Pargiters: An Essay Based upon a paper read to the London/National Society for Women’s Service’. By 2 November this ‘Essay’ had morphed into ‘an Essay-Novel, called the Pargiters’, reflecting Woolf’s intention to intercalate ‘extracts’ from the story of a family from 1880 to 202311 with interpretative essays on those extracts and more generally on the condition of women. This ground-breaking ‘Essay-Novel’ would, she hoped:

take in everything, sex, education, life &c; & come, with the most powerful & agile leaps, like a chamois across precipices from 1880 to here and now – Thats the notion anyhow, & I have been in such a haze & dream & intoxication, declaiming phrases, seeing scenes, as I walk up Southampton Row that I can hardly say that I have been alive at all, since the 10th Oct. … What has happened of course is that after abstaining from the novel of fact all these years – since 1919 – & N[ight]. & D[ay]. indeed, I find myself infinitely delighting in facts for a change, & in possession of quantities beyond counting: though I feel now & then the tug to vision, but resist it. This is the true line, I am sure, after The Waves – The Pargiters – this is what leads naturally on to the next stage – the essay-novel.12

Woolf’s conceit was that both essays and extracts were the work of a woman novelist invited to give a speech to an audience of professional women, the extracts being from The Pargiters, her novel in progress, and designed to be illustrative of the points she makes in her talk.