Pages
- Home
- Syllabus
- Stephen Spender
- Yarnall correspondence about Spender
- Checklist for Working with Manuscripts
- Sylvie and Bruno at the Lilly
- Additional readings
- Dreiser
- Mrs. Dalloway
- Sarah Helen Whitman
- Karin Stephen
- Ian Fleming
- Baudelaire 3/19/13
- Frank Crone 3/19/13
- Vanzetti 3/21/13
- Woolf
- Baldwin Mss. 3/28
- William Carlos Williams 3/28
- Shufeldt images
- Vonnegut
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Reading this tonight, I find myself wishing that Virginia Woolf had had access to a computer so that she could keep revising her writing. She wants line breaks where she did not have them and semi-colons where there were commas. So simple and so meaningfully important. On pages 142 and 143, she wants to put a sentence about the leaden circles at the end of the paragraph, not at the beginning. On page 128, she adds "called Smith" to the clause, "London has swallowed up many millions of young men...," and with these two small and necessary words, she conveys Septimus Smith's absorption into the city. I feel so compassionate as I read these pages and sense her attempts to make the changes she wants economically. I wonder if she held herself back to save the typesetters effort and the publishers money. I wish that she could have used a computer and made all of the careful and beautiful revisions that she wanted to make.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment