A rare insight into Virginia Woolf’s mind
Reproduced for the first time, SP Books introduces the only full-length draft of Mrs Dalloway published in facsimile, illustrating Virginia Woolf’s work in progress, with all her corrections. “The Hours” reveals different initial versions of the final text, most notably, an opening line other than the now famous, “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
Nearly a hundred years ago, between June 1923 and October 1924, Virginia Woolf wrote in three notebooks the only complete draft of what was to become Mrs Dalloway. In 1941, after Virginia Woolf’s death, her husband, Leonard, gave the manuscript of “The Hours” to Vita Sackville-West, her friend and lover, who kept it until her own demise in 1962. A year later, it was offered by her family to the British Museum Department of Manuscripts.
Each limited edition book is hand-numbered from 1 to 1000 and contains essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham and Virginia Woolf specialist Helen Wussow.
“Mrs Dalloway (briefly known as ‘The Hours’) would be Virginia Woolf’s first indisputably great book.” ーMichael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of The Hours
“Within the stitched notebooks of ‘The Hours’ are the narratives that are woven into the whole cloth of Mrs Dalloway” ーHelen Wussow, Virginia Woolf specialist
This volume offers the reader a fascinating insight into Woolf’s vivid creative mind through the fluctuating intensity of the purple ink which she favored for her manuscripts, as well as her marginal notes that indicate dates of writing, word-counts, and many corrections.
SP Books is an independent and acclaimed publishing house specializing in the publication of limited facsimile editions of manuscripts from some of history’s most renowned authors such as Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, Jean Cocteau, and Charles Baudelaire. In 2016, SP Books launched in the UK with the “fair copy” of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre held in the British Library, while last year saw the release of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In 2018, they released Mary Shelley’s manuscript of Frankenstein and W.A. Mozart’s last musical diary, entitled Verzeichnüss aller meiner Werke, or Catalogue of My Works. SP Books has brought several of its limited editions to the U.S., beginning with Jane Eyre and The Great Gatsby in 2017, and will follow this year with The Picture of Dorian Gray, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Frankenstein, and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.