Versioning Virginia Woolf: Notes toward a Post-eclectic Edition of Three Guineas

A surge in interest among modernist scholars in the area of textual editing has made itself evident this past year. Hailed as a “new direction” in modernist studies at the most recent meeting of the Modern Language Association, editing was also the theme of the 2008 International Conference on Virginia Woolf.¹ The dizzying array of panels devoted to textual editing, electronic editions, and digital archiving at the most recent MLA meeting testifies to a profession-wide interest in the possibilities of digital environments, particularly as economic constraints continue to make academic publishing increasingly inhospitable to expensive editorial undertakings. The proliferation of electronic editions and digital archives, and the attendant theoretical discussion of them, is bringing renewed attention to the largely invisible textual theories and practices that underlie both digital and print editions.

Post-eclectic print editions of modernist works have been in existence for several decades: Hans Gabler’s 1983 genetic edition of Ulysses, which utilizes a diachronic, synoptic apparatus for the display of textual variants; Valerie Eliot’s documentary edition of The Wasteland, which features photofacsimile reproductions and transcriptions of the holograph and typescript versions of the work; the documentary Cornell Yeats, which similarly includes photofacsimile reproductions and transcriptions of each poem; and an archival edition of Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals. Post-eclectic electronic editions of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the notebooks for James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, and Samuel Beckett’s manuscripts are only a few of the many modernist editorial projects presently underway. Merry Pawlowski and Vara Neverow’s electronic facsimile edition of the Three Guineas reading notes and Julia Briggs’s electronic genetic edition of the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse are the first efforts to bring Virginia Woolf’s writing into the electronic realm.² Woolf Online: An Electronic Edition and Commentary of Virginia Woolf’s “Time Passes” is significant not only for the insight it offers into the novel’s rich composition history, but for being the first edition of a work written by Woolf to have been edited according to contemporary textual editing theories and practices.³

Virginia Woolf’s works historically have been, and continue to be, edited according to a modernist, essentialist view of textuality that emphasizes the importance of final authorial intention and the production of emended, definitive editions of texts. Established with W. W. Greg’s influential 1950 essay “The Rationale of Copy-Text” and subsequently developed through the work of Thomas Tanselle and Fredson Bowers, this approach is regarded as “modernist” in its view of the work of art as a “well-wrought urn, at once unitary, authoritative, and superior to historical contingency, the product instead of an autonomous creative artist.”⁴ D. C. Greetham identifies both as “exemplary modernist practices” in their “organicist, artefactual view of literature and a single unitary consciousness” in which the work of art “is perceived in spatial terms of closure and completion rather than postmodernist open-ended fragmentation.”⁵

The temporary lifting of copyright on Woolf’s writings in 1992 produced a spate of new eclectic editions of Woolf’s works by Hogarth, Blackwell, Penguin, and World’s Classics, one of which (Hogarth) identified its edition as “definitive” and another (Blackwell) as “authoritative.” These editions consistently privilege the production of clear reading texts derived, with very few exceptions, from the first British editions of Woolf’s works, which are generally regarded as possessing the greatest textual authority. The rationale of one series editor, who selected the British first edition as copy-text as “a practical way of shedding the accumulated errors of later editions,” exemplifies a common practice central to the eclectic approach to textual editing: what Gerald Grigely has called “textual eugenics,” the impulse to “purify” the text by stripping it of its corruptions.⁶ Elsewhere, she distinguishes between “good” and “bad” reprint series, identifying the former as “a carefully edited text with a helpful introduction and notes” and the latter as one that “reproduces a corrupt, much reprinted text with no supporting material at all”: a dialectic implicit in Naomi Black’s reference...