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Section VIII is dominated by, but not exclusively restricted to the viewpoint of Septimus Smith, the paranoid young man whose insanity and suicide occupy half of the novel's thematic interest. For the Raverat proofs, Woolf emended nine passages on pages 128, 129, 132, 134, and 141, all of which could have been accomplished in one stint. In addition to these revises, she continued making alterations (Types III and V) for A1 and E1; the American proofs, for example, show changes in punctuation (10), capitalization (3), deletions (4), insertions (6), and substitutions (4). These revisions do not affect appreciably the characterization of Septimus Smith or the depiction of madness, but they do affect the stylistic presentation, and they do suggest the degree of Woolf's attentiveness to details.

However careful Woolf might have been, the tedium of correcting three sets of proof did produce numerous transcription errors. In addition to the example cited above from R 141.24, two other instances merit attention. Uncorrected, proof page 134 read: Rezia "could remember hearing how wonderful the shops were, from an Aunt who had lived in Soho." Woolf emended the sentence for the published editions by inserting "married and" after "had"; on the Raverat proofs, however, she misplaced the insertion after "who". Had the Raverat set been corrected first, this reading would likely have been transferred to the published editions. As this is a Type I revision,

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we can assume that the Raverat set was second or, more likely, third to be corrected in this stint. After this transcription error, the next R change does not occur until seven pages later, where Woolf made another error, but this time on Apr. The original proof reading (141.10-11) gave: "It was at that moment (Rezia had left) the great revelation took place." The substitution "gone shopping" is made on all three proofsets, but only on the Raverat and the Hogarth proofs did Woolf correctly delete the participle "left"; for the American edition she incorrectly crossed through the verb phrase "had left" and thus produced the reading "(Rezia gone shopping)" that has appeared in every American copy of the novel since 1925 (A1 140.18; A2 93.6).