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Virginia Woolf's Manuscript Revisions of The Years

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Charles G. Hoffmann
Charles G. Hoffmann*
Affiliation:
University of Rhode Island Kingston
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Extract

MOST CRITICS agree that The Years (1937) was an attempt by Virginia Woolf to modify the form of the traditional family chronicle by combining the externality of chronological events with the internality of poetic vision. We know, however, from A Writer's Diary (1953) that Virginia Woolf originally intended something quite different: she intended to write an “Essay-Novel” which would combine both forms. The facts revealed in the essay part of the novel would be explicit comment on the implicit social, economic, and sexual forces controlling the lives of the fictional characters in any given period of history, and the fiction would illustrate dramatically through characters and situations these general facts of history. Thus, Virginia Woolf's original intention was mainly one of externality, and indeed in A Writer's Diary she cautions herself against the pull toward “vision.”1 Ultimately, she combined fact and fiction by “compacting” the essay into the novel and combined externality and internality by seeking to reveal through internal vision the pattern of continuity in external events.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 84 , Issue 1 , January 1969 , pp. 79 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969

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References

1 Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary (New York, 1954), p. 184. Subsequent references are to this edition.

2 It is with the kind permission of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, that I examined and quote from the manuscript notebooks of The Years. It is also with the kind permission of Leonard Woolf, Mrs. Woolf's literary executor, that I quote from the manuscript of The Years. I also wish to acknowledge my grateful appreciation to the American Council of Learned Societies for the grant-in-aid which made this research possible.

3 Although the printed essay is undated, an allusion to reading the lecture on “Wednesday” in the Tuesday, 20 January 1931, entry of A Writer's Diary (pp. 161–162) indicates the paper was to be read either the following day or the Wednesday week. The Berg Collection contains an undated typescript version of “Professions for Women,” but a shorter, holograph version, also in the Berg Collection, is dated 21 January 1931. There are numerous textual variations between the holograph version and the published essay, but the material in the longer typescript version not found in either the holograph version or the published essay has indirect relevance to the essay portions of the manuscript version of The Years. Being largely allusions to Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf's musician friend, who apparently was scheduled to appear on the same program, this material is related indirectly to the whole question of the role of women in society raised in the manuscript.

4 The Manuscript Notebooks of The Years, Vol. i. Subsequent references to these holograph manuscript notebooks in the Berg Collection are abbreviated in the text. None of the notebooks is paginated. The notebooks average approximately one hundred fifty pages of manuscript each, except that the last volume contains only twenty-three pages of manuscript.

5 The allusion to the time span from 1800 to 2032 is to be understood not as a literal plan for the novel's chronology but as a suggestion of the continuity of the Pargiter family from the birth of Colonel Pargiter's father in 1800, as indicated in the frontispiece of the first notebook, to the present and into the future, a continuity of generations that exists underneath all the revolutionary changes of history.

6 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York, 1929), p. 93.

7 Berg Collection, holograph reading notes for Three Guineas, p. 12.

8 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York, 1938), p. 4. 9 Virginia Woolf, The Years (New York, 1937), pp. 19–20. Subsequent references are to this edition.

10 The Manuscript Notebooks of The Years, Vol. I. The direct connection between Miss Beale and Miss Craddock is made in the manuscript notebook, but the source of the quotation characterizing Dorothea Beale is not given. Most likely the same source Virginia Woolf used for Three Guineas was used for this manuscript passage—Elizabeth Raikes, Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham. See Three Guineas, p. 155.

11 The Manuscript Notebooks of The Years, Vol. ii. Probably Virginia Woolf used the same source for this quotation from Lady Lovelace as used in Three Guineas, the memoirs of Mary, Countess of Lovelace, Fifty Years, 1882–1932. See Three Guineas, p. 146. While no direct allusion is made in the novel to the “shortage of the unattached male,” it is implicit in the fact that Martin Pargiter and later his nephew North typify the young men who took up careers in the colonial service instead of marrying.

12 Orginally, in the manuscript revision of the 1880 section, Virginia Woolf divided the section into two parts or chapters, the second beginning with the scene with Edward at Oxford which is dated 14 February 1933. Thus, the reference in the diary to the “first chapter” is only to the first half of the 1880 section and not to the whole of it.

13 See A Writer's Diary, p. 224. The revised version is unavailable.

14 The Years, p. 32. The ellipsis appears in the novel.

15 The Manuscript Notebooks of The Years, Vol. ii [bracketed ellipsis mine, unbracketed ellipsis appears in the manuscript].

16 The Years, pp. 332–333 [bracketed ellipsis mine, un-bracketed ellipsis appears in the novel].

17 Virginia Woolf (New York, 1945), p. 45.

18 “Here and Now” is an alternate title for The Years found in the later manuscript notebooks: “Suddenly in the night I thought of Here and Now as a title for the Pargiters. I think it better. It shows what I'm after and does not compete with the Hemes Saga, the Forsyte Saga and so on” (Diary, p. 204).