Mrs. Dalloway

On Thursday, I want to discuss changes Virginia Woolf made on the Hogarth Press proofs of Mrs Dalloway   (1925) for the American edition of the novel, to be published by Harcourt,  Here's a link to selected pages from the first half of the novel.  She did rewrite two entire pages (we'll talk about them next week).  Often, her e corrections don't seem to amount to much.  See, for example, page 103:

p. 103:
Was it that she had taken off her wedding ring?  Her hand had grown so thin she had slipped it off, she said; she had out it in her purse, she told him.

becomes:

"My hand has grown so thin," she said; " I have put it in my purse, " she told him.

Or take p. 93:

"She wore always a black tin collecting box slung between her shoulders; marched off in thick boots with a great stick," which becomes:

"she was a great botanist marching off in thick boots with a black collecting box slung between her shoulders  (p. 93).

However, such seemingly small corrections can make a difference in a novel devoted to the narrative presentation of consciousness.

Since these proofs are so valuable, they are in the vault.  I will have to request them every day.  The most frequent proofreading signs are the "delete" sign (a roundish scribble); "l.c.," which stands for "lower case," and "stet" (which nixes a correction she just made--it means:  "this shall stand/ remains as is).

A word about the novel:  the main character is Clarissa Dalloway, a fashionable London hostess, who is about to give an important party.   The novel features her thoughts on that day, as well as memories of the past, and shifts between her consciousness and that of other personalities that have touched on her life, directly or indirectly, among them a former lover, a famous doctor, who has been invited to her party, and a patient of that doctor, Septimus Warren Smith, a WWI veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, as we would say today.The novel features their thoughts, loves, dislikes and so forth--this was Virginia Woolf's fourth novel and still my favorite of all her books.  It's sad and funny, silly and serious, all at once, and just hautingly beautiful.