This page contains links to searchable scanned PDF images of four early printings of Jacob's Room and to PDF documents containing texts of the textually significant editions, derived from the scanned images. It also includes scans of manuscripts and typescripts, the text of the omitted pages later published separately, and notes on existing editions of the novel.
This site also offers similar pages about Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and other items.
Credit where credit is due: All the information in this section of this page (down to the next horizontal line) derives from Stuart N. Clarke's scholarship in his 2020 edition of the novel in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. Clarke was the first scholar to notice the variants in the second and third impressions, and the first to establish an accurate text. I have merely summarized and confirmed his scholarship, and have provided scanned images of the editions that he describes in exhaustive detail in his textual apparatus.
The three printings of the novel that have textual authority are the first British edition, from October 1922, a slightly revised second impression, from November 1922, and the corrected September 1929 third impression of the first British edition, published in the Uniform Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. The second and third impressions were revised independently from the first edition; the third was was not revised from the second. Both have revisions or corrections evidently made by Virginia Woolf. ("Textual authority" means that the texts of these printings derive directly from the hand of the author.)
The American Harcourt, Brace edition, published in February 1923, has no independent textual authority. It was printed from a copy of the first British edition (sent directly by the printers in Edinburgh to the American publisher), and incorporates two revisions sent to the publisher by the author. It imposes the publisher's house-style, omits many of the breaks in the original, and reduces to one line the breaks that it retains.
Scans and texts of the three authoritative printings and the American printing are linked here:
No further editions appeared in the author's lifetime.
Stuart N. Clarke identified ten changes in the the second and third impressions; his findings are confirmed by my scans. Three of these changes are authorial revisions; the others are obvious corrections of printers' errors, together with one change in a possessive form, and the baffling addition of a thin space between a dash and the word that follows it. The occurrences of the changes in the Hogarth Press printings are indicated below in bold.
The authorial revisions, all made in the second impression only, are these:
The corrected errors, and one possible revision of a possessive form, and a puzzling typographic change are these:
Virginia Woolf wrote to Donald Brace, her American publisher at Harcourt, Brace, on 4 October 1922, sending two of the revisions that she then made in the second Hogarth impression:
There are two slight misprints in the copies which the
printer is sending you, &, as I have not been able to correct them before they
were sent, I note them here:
page 14, line 16 for 'colour' read
'nature'
page 263, line 12, the words 'Still, he went with them to
Constantinople' should be in brackets
The error on page 190 ("Dick" for "Nick") was reported to Virginia Woolf by Lytton Strachey, 9 October 1922: "A horrid misprint page 190 - Dick for Nick" (Letters of Lytton Strachey, ed. Paul Levy, 2005, p. 523). This arrived too late to be included in Virginia Woolf's letter to Donald Brace but soon enough to be corrected in the second Hogarth impression.
One further correction is required: page 245, 3 lines up: insert space in "inConstantinople." This is corrected in the American edition and in all posthumous British editions.
Stuart N. Clarke suggests that page 11, line 10 (beginning "'O, a huge crab,") is centered on the page; this seems to be correct, as the opening quotation mark is slightly to left of the position it would have had if the line had been indented like almost every other paragraph that begins with a quotation mark; and if the opening quotation mark is not considered in measuring the line, then the line indeed seems centered. Clarke compares this line to page 71, last line ("'Somehow it seems to matter.'"), which is clearly centered, not indented in the way that other one-line paragraphs are indented.
The following spelling errors have been emended, I think needlessly, in some editions:
Other emendations proposed by one or more editors seem needless; e.g. (from Sue Roe) "Brangaena" (page 110) and "Velasquez" (pages 204-5) are common variants. See the notes on recent editions below.
Virginia Woolf's friend Jacques Raverat, in the same letter in which he reported the misspelling "Raspaille", evidently also objected to the passage on page 49 about "every insect in the forest" that includes "one large toad" among them. She replied on 10 December 1922: "Toads are (essentially) insects, I maintain."
When setting loose lines, the printers typically added spaces around hyphens in compounds such as "biscuit - tin", "tobacco - box" (both page 148), "public - house" (page 158), and "church - bell" (page 208). I have closed up these spaces in the extracted text documents linked to this page, as does Stuart N. Clarke in his edition. On page 148, "biscuit - tin" and "tobacco - box" are spaced out in a loose line, but "biscuit-box" is closed up in a tighter text line eight lines below.
The reset (and posthumous) Hogarth Press "new edition" of 1945, set from the third-impression text, but ignoring its variously-sized breaks, introduces further errors, e.g. page 8, 3-4 lines up, "widow for these two years" (inserting "for"); and page 217, line 5, "cadge a meal of Bonamy" ("of" instead of the correct "off"). Texts that retain these readings derive from the 1945 text or its later impressions, even if they claim to derive from earlier versions.
Virginia Woolf omitted from her typescript of Jacob's Room a chapter (intended to follow chapter IX) that she later published, in 1926, as "A Women's College from Outside," her contribution to Atalanta's Garland: Being the Book of the Edinburgh University Women's Union (1926). The printed text has been widely reprinted. Scanned images of the typescript are available elsewhere on this page.
A scanned image of the printed text from Atalanta's Garland may be viewed here.
An edition of Jacob's Room ought to be based, I believe, on the text of the first Hogarth edition, with the corrections and revisions introduced in both the second and third impressions, and correcting the minor typographic error noted above. An edition that records variant readings also should, I believe, present its data in readable form, not merely in skeletal form as a list. Some current editions respect some or all of the variously-sized breaks in the original edition, but others do not. The breaks in the original edition vary from one to four lines in depth, with one pair of one-and-one-half line breaks (page 8) and one pair of three-and-a-half-line breaks (page 206). A new edition might take the following notes into account when specifying the breaks on these two pages:
A tentative version of the text of such an edition (without textual notes) may be downloaded here. The page numbers at the foot of the pages make it possible to see the variously-sized breaks as intended by the author. Unfortunately, I am not adequately skilled to avoid the typesetting solecisms of "widows" and "orphans" that skilled compositors could easily avoid.
The 1990 Hogarth Press Definitive Collected Edition, edited anonymously, claims that its text "is based on that of the original Hogarth Press edition, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf on 27 October 1922"; it seems to follow the 1945 edition (not mentioned in its brief history of publication), and, like the 1945 edition, follows the first impression (not the second-impression revisions) on pages 14, 59, and 263, and the corrected third-impression text on pages 112, 138, 142, 190, and 218. It ignores the revisions made only in the second impression, and reduces the variously-sized breaks in the first edition to single-line breaks. The possibly centered line on page 11 is not centered, but is correctly set as a separate line, with a break before the rest of the paragraph. The centered line on page 71 is incorrectly set as a normal paragraph. The edition's list of variant readings in the British and American texts is littered with errors, evidently derived from James M. Haule and Philip H. Smith, Jr.'s A Concordance to "Jacob's Room" by Virginia Woolf (1988), which mistakenly compares posthumous British and American editions instead of early ones.
Kate Flint's 1992 Oxford World's Classics edtition claims to be "based on the original edition of Jacob's Room," but seems to be based on the third-impression text. It follows the first-edition text (ignoring the second-impression revisions) on pages 14, 59, and 263; it has the corrected third-impression text on pages 112, 138, 142 (OUP house-style uses single quotation marks), and 190; on page 218 it has the first-edition text ("Flanders' darning"), not the third-impression ("Flanders's darning") but this may be the effect of Oxford's house style. The text partly reproduces the variously-sized breaks in the original texts, and includes an extensive selection from manuscipt drafts. The possibly centered line on page 11 is not centered, but is correctly set as a separate line, with a break before the rest of the paragraph. The centered line on page 71 is correctly centered, but the line that follows ("The low voice") is incorrectly set flush left. A useful appendix transcribes excerpts from the manuscript of the novel.
Sue Roe's 1992 Penguin Twentith-Century Classics edition seems to derive from the second-impression text (not mentioned in the note on the text), with further corrections. It follows the second- and third-impression corrections and revisions in every instance: pages 14, 59, 112, 138, 142 (Penguin house-style uses single quotation marks), 190, 218, 263, and 272. The text partly reproduces the variously-sized breaks in the first edition. The possibly centered line on page 11 is incorrectly set as the opening of a paragraph that continues without a break after the dash. The centered line on page 71 is correctly centered. The emendations listed in an appendix are either needless corrections of standard English usage (e.g. "give it her", "not the one", "wind and limb") or needless corrections of variant spellings. An appendix reprints the published text "A Woman's College from Outside."
The 2004 Vintage (UK) edition, with introductions by Lawrence Norfolk and Elisabeth Bronfen, claims that its text is "based on that of the original Hogarth Press edition" of 1922, but seems to use the text of the 1945 edition.
Edward L. Bishop's 2004 Shakesepare Head Press edition (Blackwell Publishers) follows the first impression, with a few required emendations, and includes a list of variants between the British and American texts. The edition seems unaware of the revisions in the second and third British impressions, but by including the two corrections that Virginia Woolf specified for the American edition (pages 14 and 263) and by correcting three obvious errors (pages 112, 138, and 190), it presents a fairly accurate text, but without the second-impression revision on page 59. The text reproduces, not entirely accurately, the variously-sized breaks in the first edition. The possibly centered line on page 11 is incorrectly set as the opening of a paragraph that continues without a break after the dash. The centered line on page 71 is incorrectly set as a normal paragraph. A list by Stuart N. Clarke and Stephen Barkway of errors in the text and notes appears in The Virginia Woolf Bulletin, 18 (January 2005), pp. 43-47.
Suzanne Raitt's 2007 Norton Critical Edition apparently derives from a composite copy-text; Prof. Raitt tells me that the Library of Congress first supplied an incomplete set of xerox copies of the Hogarth edition, then supplied the missing pages at a later date, apparently from a different copy. This seems to explain why the Norton text derives mostly, but not entirely, from the second-impression text. It follows the second-impression revisions and corrections on pages 14, 59, 142, and 190, but not on page 263, which follows the first and third impressions; it follows the first edition (not the third-impression corrections) on pages 112 and 138; but follows the third impression on page 218. The text reproduces (mostly accurately) the variously-sized breaks in the first edition. The possibly centered line on page 11 is incorrectly set as the opening of a paragraph that continues without a break after the dash. The centered line on page 71 is correctly centered. It includes extensive excerpts from the manuscript draft of the novel and the published text of "A Woman's College from Outside."
Vara Navarow's 2008 annotated Harcourt edition follows the American-edition text and has no textual apparatus.
The anonymously-edited text of the Wordsworth Classic edition of Night and Day and Jacob's Room (2012) has annotations by Dorinda Guest but no notes on the text, which seems to be set from the 1945 edition.
Stuart N. Clarke and David Bradshaw's 2020 edition in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf (the text edited by Clarke; explanatory notes by Clarke and Jane Goodman) is the only text that incorporates all of Virginia Woolf's corrections and revisions (and records but does not incorporate the third-impression's added possessive "s" on page 218). It reproduces the page layout of the original edition, including the variously-sized breaks (and is the only edition that reproduces the two one-and-a-half-line and the two three-and-a-half-line breaks). It includes a complete textual apparatus with all variants among the authoritative printings and the first American edition. It transcribes the typescript of the omitted pages later published as "A Woman's College from Outside." This is the only current edition that accurately represents the text as revised and corrected by the author (without the possibly authorial added possessive "s" on page 218).
Urmila Seshagiri's 2022 Oxford World's Classics classics edition seems to derive from the third-impression text, but reproduces the 1992 edition's note on the text, with its claim to to be based on the "original edition". Unlike the 1992 edition, it reduces the variously-sized breaks in the first edition to single line breaks; some breaks are invisible because they occur at the foot of a page without being indicated by additional space. The possibly centered line on page 11 is not centered, but is correctly set as a separate line, with a break before the rest of the paragraph. The centered line on page 71 is incorrectly set as a normal paragraph.
These manuscript and typescript sources have been obtained from online sources:
Jacob's Room: holograph manuscript (Berg Collection). Transcribed by Edward L. Bishop in Virginia Woolf's "Jacob's Room": The Holograph Draft (Pace University Press, 1998).
Jacob's Room: draft of chapter XIII from Diary XI (Berg Collection). Transcribed by Stuart N. Clarke in Virginia Woolf Bulletin, 55 (May 2017), 5-25.
Jacob's Room: omitted typescript pages (Berg Collection). Published as "A Woman's College from Outside"; see a separate section of this page.
Jacob's Room: typescript drafts headed "St. Pauls" and "Kings College Chapel" (Monks House Papers, University of Sussex Library).
I used a Czur ET Max book scanner to make digital copies of the first, second, and third British impressions and the excerpt from Atalanta's Garland. The less-than-perfect quality of my scanned images results from (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. The scan of the first American edition, which has no textual authority, derives from Google Books, as I could see no reason to spend a large sum on a physical copy.
I prepared the text-only PDF texts by correcting the scanned images of the first British edition in the OCR editor features of ABBYY FineReader and Adobe Acrobat Pro, and exporting the output to Microsoft Word. Instead of extracting the scanned text of the second and third impressions, I used ABBYY Finereader and Adobe Acrobat Pro to compare the scanned images of the second and third impression in order to the scanned image of the first impression in order to identify variant readings and remove any remaining scanning errors.
Edward Mendelson (edward [dot] mendelson [at] columbia [dot] edu)