Virginia Woolf is most often remembered for her death. People might also think of her essays, A Room of One’s Own in particular, and novels like Orlando or Mrs Dalloway. People might also think of the Bloomsbury Group. What they are less likely to turn their minds to is Woolf’s earlier writing.
Publishers frequently reissue new editions of older texts (a cynic would say that’s because they are out of copyright) to coincide with anniversaries and events in the wider media system. This is not that. In The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories, editor Urmila Seshagiri brings something actually new to the reader. In the course of researching other Woolf papers, Seshagiri was shown a manuscript of The Life of Violet, held by Longleat House (home of the Marquess of Bath, Alexander Thynn, whose family features in The Life of Violet). What is interesting is that that manuscript is a revised version of the other known manuscript held by the New York Public Library.
Ideas rarely arrive perfectly formed. In the Life of Violet’s middle chapter, ‘The Magic Garden’, there is the germ of an idea that will go on to become A Room of One’s Own. The Edenic ideas suggested by that title perhaps have more potency now, when even a room of one’s own is costly, and so the idea of “a cottage of one’s own” fits neatly into the fairytalesque tone of the story.
However, these ideas are not simply about one’s own space. There is a strong sense of the importance of a form of rurality. It is a managed form of rurality, with the cottage having a “real drawing-room” and so on, but the rural, and female focused, aspect is important both within the story’s narrative, and when considering Woolf’s view point and creative process. I’d recommend reading Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours if you are interested in that in more depth.
While these stories do not compete on an equal footing with Woolf’s later work, they show the latent talent that with practice comes to fruition in Woolf’s later, and right more commonly lauded, works. It is also worth noting she was only 25 when writing these stories, and did so as a sort of in-joke-cum-present for a friend, which rather puts me, and I assume most of you, to shame both in terms of literary out-put and friend related generosity. Hindsight is always so much easier than judgement in the moment, but it is fair to say that the stories of The Life of Violet are written with a firm sense of authorial control and playful approach to literary convention which reveals something of what is to come.
Looking at a writer’s early work also gives some insight into the writing process as you get to see how they have developed between works. The Life of Violet, is able to go one step further and gives a sense of how Woolf worked within a work. Seshagiri presents Woolf’s writing at the forefront of the book, with only a short preface and dramatis personae placed before the story, but well over half of the book’s pages are not given over to the main text of The Life of Violet. That space is taken up by a comprehensive afterword followed by very extensive textual notes which explain and detail the differences between manuscripts.
Those changes range from seemingly small things, such as swapping a comma for a semicolon, or changing where paragraphs start, to slightly more noticeable changes in word choice, such as “shrieked” vs “cried”. The edits are not simple corrections but an astute process to fine tune the work on a word-by-word basis to ensure the reader gets precisely what Woolf intends.
Those edits also rather entertainingly include changing the number of dashes in a blanked-out name. The Life of Violet will undoubtably be of great interest to those wanting to explore Woolf’s work in granular detail, but it would be a mistake to think of it only in that way. It is an entertaining story, with gossipy in-jokes and personal touches. Woolf is writing to, and for, a friend and that sense of fun pervades the work.
Words by Ed Bedford
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