Unsurprisingly, Two Stories, an early publication from Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, contains two stories: Leonard Woolf’s “Three Jews” and Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall”. This draft of “The Mark on the Wall” includes Virginia Woolf’s handwritten edits. These corrections provide glimpses into the author’s process, presumably as she was workshopping the final version of the text. Some changes (such as swapping “hair pin” to “hairpin” or adding Oxford commas) are simply copy-edits. Others (such as replacing “hand” with “foot” in the passage where narrator muses about small-town “antiquaries”, their characterization, and the objects they deem worthy of display) alter the meaning of a statement or idea. Interestingly, some of the corrections in the library’s copy of Two Stories did not make it into the final version of the story and additional changes were made between the time of the handwritten corrections and the publication of the printed version we read in class.
The Two Stories version of “The Mark on the Wall” has an entire passage about a housekeeper, who the narrator imagines to be menacing and judgmental. The housekeeper figure advances on the narrator’s imagination in an adversarial way, but she is not mentioned in the version we read in class. Instead, the class printing jumps directly to a discussion about a gently tapping tree and calmly, quietly getting lost in sea of loose, nebulous thoughts without wanting to be interrupted, which is much less stressful or threatening than the housekeeper imagery.
As a result of the inclusion of the housekeeper passage, the dreamlike thoughts of the tree passage in the Two Stories version of the text mark a change in mood when they in stark contrast to the menacingly advancing housekeeper. By using a gentle tree as foil to the housekeeper, Woolf conveys a heightened feeling of relief and solace when the narrator finally is able to slip into their thoughts “without any sense of hostility” or interruption. In the version of the story we read in class, this contrast is absent and we miss out on the heightened sense of quiet and calm.
Viewing Woolf’s handwritten edits also raise the question of whether the original draft(s) of the story were typewritten or handwritten. If the first drafts of the story were handwritten, some of the desired changes might only have been apparent when seeing how the words look on a typewritten page. Many of the typographic changes affect the reading experience and the way that the reader takes in the story. The commas that were added to the text force the reader to pause and consider the actions that are being described (e.g., “the flower, as it turns over, deluges one”). The addition of dashes and the replacement of commas and semicolons with dashes makes the writing seem more fractured, with sharper pauses or changes in direction.
One of the most common changes Woolf made was to add ellipses. These ellipses make statements more open-ended; there is no full stop at the end a thought. Instead, ideas and feelings are left open for the reader to ponder, with additional space for each reader to introduce their own interpretation. Many of the phrases that received ellipses in the edits (e.g., “if freedom exists…”) are wistful and thoughtful, which make the passages more dreamlike and stream-of-consciousness. The ellipses encourage the reader to fully immerse themselves in the writing and imagine themselves as part of the story.
While many of the typographic changes leave the door open for the reader, the Dora Carrington woodcuts remove some ambiguity. If, for example, a reader had accidentally flipped to the end of the text or caught a glimpse of the snail on the last page before reading the story’s final sentence, the snail ending may not come of as much of a surprise. The opening woodcut—a bold, dark image of someone sitting on the floor with a dog next to a fireplace—takes some artistic license (I had not imagined a dog), but I think primes the reader for the dramatic, dreamlike nature of the short story itself.
Ultimately, this early edition (which was circulated and meant for readers to read) raises the question about what our experience of literature would be like if authors regularly continued to edit and tweak their work following the first publication. At least in my experience, it is rare to be given this sort of glimpse into an author’s intentions and writing process. If we were regularly given this access or if authors regularly chose to edit their writing after a first publication, written works would not be static (as we often think of them). Instead, they would have the possibility of future change, perhaps as the author themselves changed. Although our interpretations of written works certainly can shift with the times, gaining this sort of access would make written works more of a living piece of art.
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