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  • Reply to Rejoinder: The Cambridge WoolfRejoinder by Jane Goldman and Susan Sellers, 55.4 (2012), 533–35.
  • J. H. Stape
Virginia Woolf . The Waves, Michael Herbert and Susan Sellers, ed. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. General Editors: Jane Goldman and Susan Sellers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. cxviii + 456 pp. $130.00
Virginia Woolf . Between the Acts, Mark Hussey, ed. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. General Editors: Jane Goldman and Susan Sellers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. lxl + 312 pp. $130.00

The charge that my review is "misleading" is simply wrong. Where this Edition's aims are clear—and these are intermittent in the editors' confused prefatory statements and in the volumes under their care—I disagree with them. They serve neither the author nor readers well.

In their rejoinder the general editors take the opportunity to state their aim clearly: they have "no intention" of "imposing" upon their readers firm "editorial guidance" or "authority" (their words). In this they almost comprehensively succeed. The work they sponsor is at times ill informed, inadequately researched, and accompanied occasionally with feckless notes. Given their stated aim, they should hasten to contact Cambridge University Press, under whose logo their work appears. It goes one better than the word "authoritative." On its website it proclaims this Edition no less than "definitive." Caveat lector.

The defense of their work—which bodes ill generally for the future of this Edition—descends to personal comment and, to use the writers' own word, "peevishness." If this is their notion of "dialogue"—and the tone of their rejoinder is both nasty and personal—it is clear that [End Page 269] treats of a special sort are to be available in Woolf circles, in which they believe themselves at the center. I felt no need to state my credentials, which are for the world to see on the Internet and elsewhere. But then—despite the cry for "transparency"—neither do the general editors state theirs to undertake the specialized work of this kind. How the writing of novels, translating, or doing feminist literary theory equip one for the textual editing is a question there is no space to explore here.

My review certainly has no quarrel with the value, indeed the very necessity, of transparency in textual editing; the clear laying out of evidence for decisions taken is, and remains, the core of the editorial task. Goldman and Sellers misconstrue my objections to their procedures: the question remains whether it is necessary (or in some cases practical) to record the dotting of every "i" and crossing of every "t" when judiciously chosen examples would serve. Moreover, they somehow believe that they present all the evidence, yet anyone interested in the textual history of The Waves cannot do without John Graham's edition of the manuscripts for the novel's earliest forms. This Edition, unlike most scholarly ones, has a wavering and uncertain interest in preprint materials. Moreover, whatever its editors think they are doing, they in the end do present one "winner" out of the various possible contending copy-texts: the text in the front, which the reader reads, and one (or several) in the back in the list of variants.

To pretend that each instance of American compositorial house-styling is the Holy Grail itself is, however, mere smoke and mirrors. It is good to know of such things in summary form, and it is precisely an editor's business to be concerned with these, his or her job being to work for the reader who has less time, less inclination, and fewer research grants to deal with the very hard work of compiling and accessing variants and researching textual history. The reader concerned with every instance of compositorial alteration would be a rare bird indeed; and for authors whose textual situations are considerably more complex than Woolf's, the principle (let's call it that) announced here simply falls apart. In, for example, the case of the thirteen extant versions of Conrad's Victory—the manuscript, two typescripts (one with two texts in it: that as typed and that authorially revised, the other with four texts...

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