This page contains links to searchable scanned PDF images of three early printings of The Waves and to PDF documents containing the texts of those editions, extracted from the scanned images. It also contains links to scanned images of the unmarked and marked proofs of the novel, the eight notebooks with drafts of the novel, and of the first French translation.
This site also offers similar pages about Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and other items.
The two printings of the novel that have textual authority are the first British edition and the first American edition, both from 1931. A 1933 edition from The Albatross, published for sale on the European continent, has one correction by the author but is otherwise based on the first British edition. Scanned images of all three editions are available from this page. See the note below for technical information about these scans.
The British edition was published by the Hogarth Press on 8 October 1931. The American edition, although published two weeks later, on 22 October, represents an earlier state of the text. The American text is based on proof corrections made by the author before she made her final proof corrections for the British text.
The two authoritative printings (and the Albatross edition) are as follows:
The 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).
The October 1933 British third impression, for the Uniform Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf has no textual significance, but readers who wish to see a scanned image of it may find it here.
When supplying the Albatross with a copy of the British edition to be used in setting the text, Virginia Woolf evidently indicated that a break should be added between "And we pray" and "Now we march" (Albatross, page 30). This break occurs invisibly at the foot of page 35 in the British edition, but is visible in the American edition as a result of Virginia Woolf's explicit marking in the American proofs. The only conceivable explanation for the break in the Albatross edition is that the author specified it, as the Albatross edition is otherwise based on the British text, not the American. All other deliberate changes (not merely typographical errors) in the Albatross edition seem to have been corrections made by an editor.
The differences between the first British edition and the Albatross edition may be seen in this PDF document that displays the variants in different colors (blue and struck through for the British edition, red and underlined for the Albatross).
The French translator of the novel, Marguerite Yourcenar, consulted with Virginia Woolf on questions about the text. Her translation supplies words that were missing from the English-language texts and were probably supplied by Virginia Woolf. Details may be found below.
Virginia Woolf seems to have made no changes to later reprints of any edition. The 1931 second impression and the 1933 third impression in the Uniform Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf are set from the same type as the first impression, but in the third impression the final "l" dropped out of "will" on p. 35, at the end of line 9. The posthumous 1943 resetting, also for the Uniform Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. introduced a number of new errors while correcting a few existing ones; a scan of a later reprint of the 1943 resetting may be found online.
The page and line numbers that follow refer to the scanned images of the first British edition.
Some errors in the British edition seem to have resulted from Virginia Woolf's ambiguous proof-corrections. For example, the en-dash surrounded by spaces in "moonlight - coloured May" (page 60) seems to have been a compositor's misinterpretation of a hyphen inserted in the printed proofs' "moonlight coloured may"; the flower takes an upper-case "M" and it is unclear whether Virginia Woolf or the compositor capitalized the name. The marked proofs lack this correction, and the American edition has the same reading as the printed text in the proofs.
In addition to the missing words discussed below, seventeen other errors in the British edition are these:
A plausible but not strictly necessary emendation is suggested in the Cambridge edition (see below):
Unnecessary corrections made in other editions include, among others, these:
The 1993 Shakespeare Head Press edition, among others, makes further needless corrections to punctuation not listed here.
The proofs and editions represent the final stages in the composition of The Waves. The earlier stages are extensively recorded in J. W. Graham's edition The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts (University of Toronto Press, 1976). The typescript that represents the intermediate stage between the holograph drafts and the proofs is, like most of Virginia Woolf's typescripts, lost. Very little of the holograph material seems to have survived in recognizable form into the final stages.
I am grateful to Stephen Barkway for invaluable help in preparing this page and the linked documents.
An unmarked set of poofs, lacking the leaf with pages 301 and 302, was given by Virginia Woolf to Hugh Walpole and is now in the Smith College Library. Scanned images of the Smith College proofs, kindly provided by the Library, may be found here.
A marked set of proofs, sent by Virginia Woolf for use by Harcourt, Brace in printing the American edition, was retained by Donald Brace and is now in the Columbia University Library, having been acquired for the Library by Karla Nielsen. The proofs include the previously unknown text marked for deletion on page 302. Scanned images of the Columbia Library proofs may be found here.
An essay on the discovery made possible by the Columbia Library proofs may be found here.
These proofs, like all of Virginia Woolf's manuscript and unpublished works, are protected by copyright in the United Kingdom (not elsewhere) through 2039. They are posted here by permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf. The Estate further specifies: “Users of the website may make copies of the Works under general copyright exceptions, but cannot further copy, share or adapt the Works. This shall only be for non-commercial purposes and the copyright holder shall be credited.” These restrictions apply only in those places where the proofs are protected by copyright.
A previously unsolved textual puzzle occurs on page 93, 3 lines up: "wearing a black tie some detestable Frenchman whom nobody has ever heard of." One or more words were evidently omitted. For the American edition, an editor added a comma after "black tie". The unnamed editor of the 2000 Wordsworth Classics edition made an equally unlikely emendation: "a black tie for some detestable". A minimal conjectural emendation (written by an editor in pencil in the Harcourt proofs, with a question mark next to it, but not used in the printed text) would insert "like" after "tie", but this was unequal to the surrounding prose. (This and another conjectural emendation were made in different settings of the 2000 Wordsworth Classics edtion described below.)
The solution to the problem may be found in Marguerite Yourcenar's translation into French, Les Vagues (Paris: Librairie Stock, 1937). (A scanned image of a later printing is posted here; the text and typesetting are the same as the first edition.)
Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary, probably on 23 February 1937, that Mme. Yourcenar had visited: “we went through The Waves. What does ‘See here he comes?’ mean & so on.” Yourcenar’s translation, published later that year, renders the phrase with the missing words as “puis, aux vacances de Pâques, vous irez visiter Paris, et vous reviendrez portant une cravate noire, et transformé en un odieux Français que personne n’a rencontré jusqu’ici” (p. 85).
No one but Virginia Woolf, answering Mme. Yourcenar’s questions, could have provided the words translated as “et transformé en”. The English text she provided seems likely to have been “wearing a black tie, and transformed into some detestable Frenchman” (possibly "tie, transformed", because "and" may not be required by English-language rhythm). The words “transformed into” also occur in her Roger Fry (1940). The text that Virginia Woolf provided in 1937 may not have been the same text that she had mistakenly omitted from her typescript many years earlier, but it at least seems likely to be the text that she provided when it was needed, and makes it possible to reconstruct a complete English text of the novel.
A copy of the Albatross Edition of The Waves is in Marguerite Yourcenar's library at her home, La Petite Pleasance, in Northeast Harbor, Maine, USA, but it unforunately has no markings. Her notes on her visit to Virginia Woolf seem to be lost.
Note: A later translation, by Michel Cusin, also titled Les Vagues (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), has the same mistaken emendation found in other editions, inserting "like" where words are missing: "tu reviendras en portant la cravate noire, comme un Français détestable dont personne n'a jamais entendu parler" (p. 128).
Virginia Woolf drafted the novel in seven numbered notebooks and an additional notebook with notes on the novel. These are in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; microfilmed copies were published in 1993, and scanned images from the microfilm are posted on the Internet Archive. (The notebooks are the source for J. W. Graham's 1976 edition of the drafts.) For convenience, they may be downloaded here.
An edition of The Waves ought to be based, I believe, on the text of the first Hogarth edition, corrected by adding the line break added to the 1933 Albatross edition, and with the further corrections noted above, and the restoration of the missing words noted elsewhere on this page. No existing edition does all this, although the Cambridge edition adds the line break omitted in all other editions that are based on the Hogarth text. An edition that records variant readings also should, I believe, present its data in readable form, not merely in skeletal form as a list.
Editions based on the 1943 resetting, not the 1931 edition, may be identified by (among other variants) these errors (page and line numbers from the 1931 edition):
Many existing editions of The Waves present a text prepared by an editor, not merely reprinted without explanation from an earlier version. These are described below. A few other editions include explanatory notes but no notes on the text. One such edition is Molly Hite's 2006 Annotated Edition (HarperCollins), which uses (but does not identify itself as using) the American text.
The anonymously-edited 1990 Hogarth Press "Definitive Collected Edition," with an introduction by Angelica Garnett, claims in a "Publisher's Note" to be based on the British first edition, but is in fact based on the 1943 resetting. It includes some silent emendations to punctuation and one acknowledged punctuation change taken from the American edition. It includes a list of variants in the American edition, not including minor differences in punctuation; however, the list mistakenly reports ten readings from 1943 British resetting (listed above) as occurring in the first British edition, and the list therefore erroneously describes them as variants between the British and American editions, although in fact none of the ten is an actual variant in the first editions.
Gillian Beer's 1992 Oxford World’s Classics edition has a text based on the 1933 Uniform Edition reprint of the first British edition, with a textual note that mistakenly reports that this reprint was revised from the first edition; the earlier readings described in the note as printed in the first edition are in fact variant readings from the first American edition.
Kate Flint's 1992 Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition (later reprinted and reset under other Penguin imprints) has a text based on the British first edition, with a few emendations mostly based on the American edition; the proofs (not yet available in 1992) make clear that some of these emendations mistakenly reverse Virginia Woolf's revisions for the British text.
Stella McNichol’s 1992 edition of the novel in a Macmillan “student compendium,” Collected Novels of Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, has a text based on the 1931 British edition, with a few regularizing emendations.
James M. Haule and Philip H. Smith, Jr.’s 1993 Shakespeare Head Press edition (Blackwell Publishers) uses the text of the first British edition, with emendations to punctuation (some of them unnecessary), and a list of variants in the American edition.
The 2000 Wordsworth Classics edition, with an introduction by Deborah Parsons, has no textual apparatus, but was prepared with some attention to the text. Two slightly different typesettings seem to exist; one (ISBN 1-84022-410-X) tries to resolve the textual puzzle described above by printing (on p. 48) "a black tie [like] some detestable"; the other, possibly later one (ISBN 978-1-84022-410-8), tries to resolve the puzzle by printing (again on p. 48) "a black tie for some detestable";
Michael Herbert and Susan Sellers's 2011 edition in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf uses the text of the first British edition, with the lost line break restored from the American edition. It corrects most but not all of the errors in the Hogarth edition, makes some needless emendations, and lists variants in the American and Albatross editions and the printing error in the Uniform Edition.
David Bradshaw’s 2015 Oxford World’s Classics edition is based on the same 1933 text as the 1992 Oxford edition, with minor emendations, and a textual note that repeats the erroneous publishing history in the 1992 edition.
American vs. British texts: A common myth among American editors of Virginia Woolf's novels states that no conclusive evidence favors either the American or the British edition as Virginia Woolf's more-considered or later-considered text. This defies both reality and common sense. In order for the American and British editions to be published on the same day, as Virginia Woolf had arranged for most of her novels, she was obliged to send proofs for the American edition at least two weeks before she was obliged to return proof for the British edition. One of those two weeks was required by shipborne transatlantic mail; the other of those weeks was required for the full resetting the text by an American printer, as was then required by American copyright law. For the British edition, she could return the marked proofs to Edinburgh via overnight mail for the printers to make minor corrections requiring at most a few hours of labor. Absolutely no plausible reason exists for preferring the earlier American texts to the later British ones.
I prepared these scanned images by using a Czur ET-24 Pro book scanner to make digital copies of three versions of the text: the first Hogarth Press edition, from 1931, the Uniform Edition, from 1933, and The Albatross edition, from 1933; I used a Czur Shine Ultra book scanner to make the digital copy of the American (Harcourt) edition, also from 1931. The less-than-perfect quality of the scanned images is the result of (1) my incompetence, (2) the relatively low-priced scanners that I used, and (3) the cheap, battered copies of the original editions that I could afford to buy.
I corrected the scanned output by proofreading all three 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.
Edward Mendelson (edward [dot] mendelson [at] columbia [dot] edu)