University of Virginia Library

Section VI (89.20-99.8; A1 88.4-97.17)

At Apr 89.19/20, Woolf divided her text and began the sixth section as Peter Walsh awakes from his nap in Regent's Park. Page 90 of the American proofs shows only minor revises (the deletion of two parentheses, an alteration in capitalization, and the insertion of the word "and"). Page 91, however, is heavily revised, and it is here that Woolf began correcting Raverat's set in addition to the other two, perhaps because she recognized that the revises were becoming so numerous or because she momentarily confused R with Apr. In Section VI a cluster of R revises occurs between pages 91 and 95, four of which are transcribed incorrectly.

The first passage emended for Raverat, in fact, is one of the most interesting for what it reveals about Woolf's proof-reading. Here, Peter Walsh recalls Clarissa Dalloway in a socially awkward moment at Bourton in the 1890s:

This passage contains revises of Types I and II where transcription errors and authorial oversights are clearly evident, and it suggests not only that the Hogarth proofs were the first to be corrected in this instance, but also that Woolf continued correcting this set later. For Apr she overlooked two deletions she had made for Hogarth: the final "-ness" of "hardness" and the alteration of the capital "I" of "It" to lower case. On its own authority, the Harcourt edition silently corrected these errors to preserve parallel stucture in the sentence (A1 89.11-15). Had Woolf been transcribing from either Apr or R, it is unlikely that she would have made the right correction for E1. The failure to delete "unimaginative" in Apr can be an authorial oversight (Type II), or its deletion in E1 can be seen as a subsequent revision (Type V), but either way we should consider the Hogarth edition as having the more reliable reading for this passage. The botched emendation renders the passage senseless in the Raverat text, ungrammatical in the Harcourt edition, but correct and readable in the Hogarth.

At Apr 93.7, Woolf changed the upper case "O" of "Old" to lower case, making a slash through the capital and writing "l.c." in the right margin. Since E1 supplies the same reading, we can assume that she made the change on the Hogarth proofs as well. For Raverat, she simply drew the slash through the upper case "O" and wrote "o" in the margin, in accordance with her practice not to use proofreader's symbols on his set. Thus in all cases the texts agree here that Peter Walsh goes in to dinner and sits beside "old Miss Parry." Two pages later, however, the following changes are made:

On the basis of the change at 93.7, it could be argued that the Harcourt edition provides a more reliable reading than the Hogarth in this instance. The failure of E1 to include the change has several possible explanations: (1) Woolf forgot to make the change on the Hogarth proofs; (2) she made the change for Hogarth, but the printer overlooked her revision; (3) she made the

correction for Hogarth, but on a subsequent reading decided to retain the original phrasing. Without the Hogarth proofs, it is impossible to determine the intended reading of this passage where variants of all five types may well exist side by side. Given the accuracy of the Hogarth printer (based on a collation of Apr and E1), the second option above has the least to recommend it. The third possible explanation is more speculative, but there are several instances in Apr where Woolf emended a passage only to write "stet" in the margin to signal retention of the original phrasing. If this is an authorial oversight (Type II) where Woolf forgot to make the correction for E1 which she had made for A1, then the various revises suggest Woolf's carelessness and confusion in trying to work with three sets of proof.