This page contains links to searchable scanned PDF images of the early printings of Mrs. Dalloway and to PDF documents containing the texts of those editions, extracted from the scanned images. This page also includes notes on existing editions of the novel and the story "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street."
Four printings of the novel have textual authority: the first American and first British editions, and two later impressions of the first British edition, both of the latter with revisions evidently made by Virginia Woolf. A scanned image and text are also provided for the Introduction to the 1928 Modern Library reprint of the American edition. See the note below for technical information about these scans.
The American edition, although published on the same day as the British edition, represents an earlier state of the text than the British edition. The American text is based on proof corrections made by the author before she made her final proof corrections for the British edition.
The four authoritative printings (and the 1928 Introduction) are as follows:
All other editions of the novel were made after the author's death in 1941 and have no independent textual authority. Many current British editions are based on the reset edition published by the Hogarth Press in 1942, not on the 1925-through-1929 printings.
Virginia Woolf made the following changes in the September 1925 second impression (page numbers refer to the scanned PDFs):
Virginia Woolf made changes on seven pages in the September 1929 third impression, for the "Uniform Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf" (page numbers refer to the scanned PDFs):
—"The third impression (the "Uniform Edition") is the most accurate text, but has the following typing and compositorial errors (page numbers refer to the scanned PDFs):
The many differences between the first American edition and the first British edition may be seen in this PDF document that displays the variants in different colors (blue and struck through for the American edition, red and underlined for the British).
Some errors in the American edition resulted from Virginia Woolf's mistaken
or ambigous proof-corrections. For example, "silver flashing—plumes
like" instead of the correct, British-edition reading "silver-flashing plumes
like" (American edition, p. 69). Virginia Woolf mistakenly indicated that the
hyphen should be placed after "flashing" and an American editor tried to make
sense of this by using a dash instead.
Similarly, the American edition has "If they failed him, he had support police" instead of the correct, British-edition reading "If they failed, he had to support him police" (American edition, p. 154). Virginia Woolf added "him" in the right-hand margin, following "to support" and did not think it necessary to add an insertion mark (caret) at the same point. The American editor, not finding an insertion mark, pencilled in a caret earlier in the line. Both these errors seem never to have been corrected in any edition of the American text.
A note on the marked proofs. Two sets of marked proofs of the novel survive. One set, marked for Harcourt, Brace to use when setting the American edition in type, is in the Lilly Library (generally known as the "Harcourt proofs"). A second set, less extensively marked, given by Virginia Woolf to her friend Jacques Raverat so that he could read the book before he died, is in the UCLA Library (generally known as the "Raverat Proofs"). Both libraries kindly provided scanned images of these proofs, but I do not have the rights to post them here.
For further information on the proofs, see the editions by G. Patton Wright, Morris Beja, and Anne E. Fernald, described below. Full accounts are in E. F. Shields’ “The American Edition of Mrs. Dalloway,” Studies in Bibliography, 1974; and Glenn P. Wright (i.e., G. Patton Wright), “The Raverat Proofs of Mrs. Dalloway,” Studies in Bibliography, 1986.
I am grateful to Stuart N. Clarke and Mark Hussey for indispensable help in preparing this page.
This story, from which developed into the novel, appeared in the American magazine The Dial, July 1923. A scanned image (modified from the image at Google Books) may be found here, together with a PDF of the text.
No existing edition is based, as I believe an edition ought to be based, on the text of the first Hogarth edition, altered with the nine revisions that Virginia Woolf made to the later printings in 1925 and 1929, and with the corrections described above to five errors that she left uncorrected in the Hogarth edition.
Many existing editions of Mrs. Dalloway present a text prepared by an editor, not merely reprinted without explanation from an earlier version. These are describe below; in the descriptions, the phrase "the 1942 text” refers to the reset edition issued by the Hogarth Press after Virginia Woolf’s death, apparently with no textual authority; it introduces errors in text and layout that were not present in the earlier printings. The most notable error is the loss of the section break after the last of the old woman's nonsense couplets near the foot of p. 125 in the 1925 and 1929 impressions.
A few other editions, not listed below, include explanatory notes but no notes on the text.
G. Patton Wright’s 1990 Hogarth Press "Definitive Collected Edition" is based on the British first edition, heavily emended with variants partly derived from the American edition and partly based on the editor’s personal judgment on matters of consistency and logic. It includes extensive lists of variants from all prior editions (including those with no textual authority) and from the marked proofs.
Note: Patton Wright's textual note on p. 207 of his edition confusingly reports that Virginia Woolf may have changed her mind after "indicating on both sets" of marked proofs that she wanted a paragraph break after "So Peter Walsh snored." In fact neither set of proofs is marked with any indication at this point; the paragraph break is already present in the printed proof, and accordingly appears in the American edition. It was removed in the Hogarth Press edition, evidently in order to provide an extra line of space to accommodate the additional space that she had explicitly specified in the Harcourt marked proofs (not in the Raverat proofs) two lines above.
Claire Tomalin’s 1992 Oxford World’s Classics edition has a text “based on the original edition,” but apparently reprinted from the 1942 text.
Stella McNichol’s 1992 Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition, with an introduction by Elaine Showalter, is based on the 1925 first edition, with some but not all of Virginia Woolf’s later changes; with well-considered emendations; and with notes about some other variant readings. It has often been reprinted and reset (with formatting errors) under other Penguin imprints.
A 1993 Everyman’s Library edition, anonymously edited but with an introduction by Nadia Fusini, is “based on the original edition,” but seems to be reprinted from the 1942 text. The same text is used in the 2021 Vintage Classics edition.
Morris Beja’s 1996 Shakespeare Head Press edition (Blackwell Publishers) is based largely on the marked proofs of the American edition, with an extensive, sometimes tendentious, textual apparatus.
David Wright’s 2000 Oxford World’s Classics edition is based on the 1942 text, with minor editorial emendations.
Bonnie Kime Scott’s 2005 annotated Harcourt edition uses the American text; the notes mention a few textual matters.
A 2011 Folio Society edition, anonymously edited, reports: “This edition follows the text of the first edition with minor emendations.” It adopts three of the nine revisions found in later texts, adds one mistaken emendation ("and" in "Holmes Bradshaw"), and omits a section break. (Information generously provided by Francesca Wade.)
Jo-Ann Wallace, in her 2013 Broadview Press edition, “takes the first Hogarth Press edition as my copy-text, retaining even the errors”; the text in some places, however, matches the 1942 edition, not the earlier printings. It seems likely that the text was prepared from the 1942 edition, but was then modified by incorporating the 1925 variants listed in Patton Wright's edition. The evidence for this is that the Broadview text omits the section break dropped from the 1942 printing (p. 125; see above) and has the 1929 and later reading "his hat in his hand" (p. 120; see above), which is the one variant that Patton Wright had not noticed; an editor working backwards from the 1942 text using Patton Wright's apparatus would not have known to remove "his" from this phrase in order to restore the 1925 version.
Anne E. Fernald’s 2015 edition in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf is the only edition that accurately reproduces the 1925 first edition, with a few clearly-noted emendations and one of Virginia Woolf's later revisions. The textual apparatus records variants from the proofs and from all editions that have textual authority.
Merve Emre’s 2021 Liveright edition, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, is based closely on the 1925 text, but inserts a sentence from the American text that Virginia Woolf had dropped from the British 1925 text, and accidentally omits a paragraph with almost two hundred words.
Anne E. Fernald’s 2021 edition in the Norton Critical Editions series is based on the first American edition. It is the only edition based on the American text that restores the two section breaks marked in the proofs but invisible in the 1925 edition because they occur at the foot of a printed page.
All editions first published in North America are based on the American text, with the exception of Jo-Ann Wallace’s Broadview Press edition (published in Canada) and Merve Emre’s Liveright edition.
Any edition that claims to be based on the 1925 first British edition but has on p. 120, line 22, "hat in his hand" (not "hat in hand") is in fact based on the 1929 or 1942 version of the text, not the 1925 first edition.
I prepared these scanned images by using a Czur ET-24 Pro book scanner to make digital copies of four versions of the text: the first and second Hogarth Press impressions from 1925; the Uniform Edition from 1929; and the Harcourt (American) first edition from 1925. The less-than-perfect quality of the scanned images is the result of (1) my incompetence, (2) the relatively low-priced scanner that I used, and (3) the cheap, battered copies of the original editions that I could afford to buy. The image of the first Hogarth edition is based on a damaged ex-library copy stamped as discarded by the Cambridge Union Library.
I corrected the scanned output by proofreading all four versions in the OCR editor features of ABBYY FineReader and Adobe Acrobat Pro; then, using those applications and Microsoft Word, I compared the scanned texts to each other in order to identify variant readings and remove any remaining scanning errors. I used the same scanner and software to provide the text of the Introduction to the 1928 Modern Library edition.
Edward Mendelson (edward [dot] mendelson [at] columbia [dot] edu)