SP Books has brought together the three notebooks in which Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway and published them in one hand-bound manuscript facsimile edition, the first of its kind. The manuscript includes revisions, crossed-out passages, and marginalia in Woolf's own handwriting. Accompanied by a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham (The Hours), the limited edition publication is hand-numbered from 1 to 1000.
Woolf's husband described the notebooks in which she wrote Mrs Dalloway as bound in the ‘coloured, patterned Italian papers’ of which she was very fond. The notebooks show all the edits that Woolf made in flowing purple ink, providing a unique insight into her creative process. Woolf drew pencil margins on each page of her notebooks, where she would record the date, word count, and other interesting bits of marginalia including personal memos and notes for her essays.
The French publisher hopes reading the classic novel in such a form will represent a return to "slow reading in a digital age, offering an intimate insight into the writer's mind and thought-process, and giving new life to a well-loved classic." This is not the first book to be given such treatment by SP, which published a limited manuscript edition of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 2018, as well as several others.
The Dalloway edition also includes an essay from Helen Wussow, dean of The New School in New York.
