The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf – serie

The Years is perhaps Virginia Woolf's most politically and historically embedded novel. It covers a period of intense social change from the 1880s to the 1930s, making direct reference to suffrage, Irish Home Rule, the First World War and anti-semitism. The novel's composition history is unusually complex; the text changed radically from its inception in 1931 to its publication in 1937. This edition provides readers with a fully collated and annotated text. It includes a substantial introduction that charts the composition process, a detailed chronology and full annotation of all historical, cultural and topographical references. All variants from extant galley and page proofs, as well as editions of the novel produced in Woolf's lifetime, are included, and reveal the significant and crucial changes Woolf made even in the months before publication.

Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf's third novel, is short compared with its predecessor Night and Day. She said herself that she learnt what to leave out by putting it all in. Jacob's Room may be read as the simple story of a young man's life from childhood until his death in the First World War, but it is much more than that: it subtly indicts a society that instils obedience and celebrates militarism. Consequently, Jacob's death seems random yet inevitable. Extensive explanatory notes clarify the myriad passing allusions, which should lead to a reassessment of Jacob's Room as one of the great modernist masterpieces, taking its place with Ulysses and The Waste Land in the iconic year of 1922. The substantial introduction includes a detailed account of the novel's composition, publication, and early critical reception, together with chronologies of composition and of Woolf's life.

Virginia Woolf's extraordinary last novel, Between the Acts, was published in July 1941. In the weeks before she died in March that year, Woolf wrote that she planned to continue revising the book and that it was not ready for publication. Her husband prepared the work for publication after her death, and his revisions have become part of the text now widely read by students and scholars. Unlike most previous editions, the Cambridge edition returns to the final version of the novel as Woolf left it, examining the stages of composition and publication. Using the final typescript as a guide, this edition fully collates all variants and thus accounts for all the editorial decisions made by Leonard Woolf for the first published edition. With detailed explanatory notes, a chronology and an informative critical introduction, this volume will allow scholars to develop a fuller understanding of Woolf's last work.

The Waves is one of the greatest achievements in modern literature. Commonly considered the most important, challenging and ravishingly poetic of Virginia Woolf's novels, it was in her own estimation 'the most complex and difficult of all my books'. This edition will be the most authoritative, most fully collated and annotated text available to scholars to date, and for considerable time to come. It maps the text of The Waves from the first British edition to all other editions published in Woolf's lifetime, as well as to all extant proofs. The text is presented in clearly readable form, with page-by-page direction to emendation, variants, and notes. The substantial introduction includes a detailed account of the novel's composition, publication and early critical reception. There are extensive explanatory notes on the text, a full chronology of composition and publication and a more general chronology covering Woolf's life and works.

Flush: A Biography (1933), Woolf's second radical experiment in biography (after Orlando: A Biography) was a runaway best-seller. This life of the pet spaniel of Victorian poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, playfully tests human-animal boundaries and speaks to rising concerns with class, sexuality and eugenics. This edition demonstrates Flush's historical grounding in the Brownings' era and Woolf's own. It provides rigorous, transparent collation of all extant states of Flush published in Woolf's lifetime. The extensive Explanatory Notes offer fresh insight into sociopolitical and literary contexts. This edition presents, for the first time, full transcriptions of Woolf's reading notebooks and drafts, plus the serialised Atlantic Monthly version. The Introduction maps composition history and draws on rediscovered early reviews. It charts Flush's critical reception to current renewed critical interest. This edition establishes Flush as a playfully ironic and seriously experimental work worthy of wide readership and sustained scholarly attention.

A romantic comedy in which the central characters have a distinctly unromantic disposition, Night and Day was Virginia Woolf's second novel. Written during the First World War, the novel is set in the suffrage campaign of the pre-war years. Often understood as a deliberate exercise in classicism, it has been neglected by critics drawn to Woolf's later more overtly experimental fictions. This edition provides a substantial introduction, which traces the chronology of the novel's composition and publication, and which draws on previously neglected sources to trace its reception. Its extensive explanatory notes clarify the novel's relation to Woolf's reading and to the literary, cultural, and historical context of its time, with attention both to the time of its setting and its composition. Maps locate the key settings in London and England. The introduction and textual apparatus trace the complex history of the impressions and editions issued during Woolf's lifetime.

Orlando, a novel loosely based on the life of Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf's lover and friend, is one of Woolf's most playful and tantalizing works. This edition provides readers with a fully collated and annotated text. A substantial introduction charts the birth of the novel in the romance between Woolf and Sackville-West, and the role it played in the evolution and eventual fading of that romance. Extensive explanatory notes reveal the extent to which the novel is embedded in Woolf's knowledge of Sackville-West, her family history and her writings. Thorough annotation of every literary and historical allusion in the text establishes its significance as a parodic literary and social history of England, as well as a spoof of one of Woolf's favorite forms, the biography. It also includes all variants from the extant proofs, as well as editions of the novel produced during Woolf's lifetime.