Collected Works Woolf, Virginia: Complete Works | v.11.1 | Update 6 Feb 2024

[pynch]

This volume collects the complete writings of Virginia Woolf (wikipedia): 8 novels, 3 ‘biographies,’ 46 short stories, 606 essays, 1 play, her diary and the letters.



THE NOVELS
The Voyage Out (1915)
Night and Day (1919)
Jacob’s Room (1922)
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
To the Lighthouse (1927)
The Waves (1931)
The Years (1937)
Between the Acts (1941)

THE ‘BIOGRAPHIES’
Orlando: a biography (1928)
Flush: a biography (1933)
Roger Fry: a biography (1940)

THE STORIES
Two Stories (1917)
Kew Gardens (1919)
Monday or Tuesday (1921)
A Haunted House, and other short stories (1944)
Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble (1966)
Mrs Dalloway’s Party (1973)
The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985)

THE ESSAYS
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924)
The Common Reader I (1925)
A Room of One’s Own (1929)
On Being Ill (1930)
The London Scene (1931)
A Letter to a Young Poet (1932)
The Common Reader II (1932)
Walter Sickert: a conversation (1934)
Three Guineas (1938)
Reviewing (1939)
The Death of the Moth, and other essays (1942)
The Moment, and other essays (1947)
The Captain’s Death Bed, and other essays (1950)
Granite and Rainbow (1958)
Books and Portraits (1978)
Women And Writing (1979)
383 Essays from newspapers and magazines (see update v.3.0)

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING
A Writer’s Diary (1953)
Moments of Being (1976)
The Diary Vols. 1–5 (1977-84) (see updates v.4.0, v.5.0, and v.6.0)
The Letters Vols. 1–6 (1975-80) (see update v.7.0, v.8.0, v.9.0, and v.10.0)
The Letters of V.W. and Lytton Strachey (1956) (see update v.8.0)
A Passionate Apprentice. The Early Journals 1887-1909 (1990) (see update v.10.0)

THE PLAY
Freshwater: A Comedy (both versions) (1976)

I have thoroughly checked and corrected the formatting, comparing them to print editions wherever available (see update v.6.1 and v7.0). Special classes have been assigned to poems, quotes, subtitles, section breaks, etc. All of the missing Greek words and, if necessary, the italics have been put back in and footnotes have been made active. Fonts are embedded for small caps and the greek letters. Also, I have scanned the illustrations for the three ‘biographies’ (because biographies need pictures, right?), that were missing in the online editions of the books.

I have noted dates of first publication for almost all of the texts. In the cases of novels and stories, these are the publication dates of the books. The essays, however, have quite often been published in newspapers and journals before, so I did some research in my local state library and have noted the names of the journals and the publication dates. If anyone needs an overview for academic or other reasons, send me a PM and I can send you an Excel table with the info.

I have sorted the texts chronologically in the order of book publication, to separate the books published in Virginia Woolf’s lifetime from the posthumous ones. As these books often collected writings from different years, I have also made 4 indexes with alphabetical and chronological lists of stories and essays, so it shouldn’t be difficult to find whatever you’re looking for.

To make navigation easy, there’s a main table of contents at the beginning bringing you to all the books, who have their own contents tables. Also, there are links after each text/chapter to get back to the respective tables. “Mrs Dalloway,” “The Waves,” and “Between the Acts” don’t have chapter but only section breaks, which are indicated in the contents tables.

‘Complete,’ of course, is never complete. There is still one story missing, “A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus” (see update v.2.0), which I hope to enter into the volume soon. Regarding the essays, only the book collections published before 1987 are available (see update v.3.0), and there are no letters or diaries (except for the excerpts in “A Writer’s Diary”)(see updates v.4.0–v.7.0). It’s possible that I will scan these in the future, but don’t hold your breath.

For those who don’t want to read all the remarks for the updated versions below: all the texts have either been proofed against the latest Hogarth Press editions authorised by Virginia Woolf herself, or have been proofread. Variants of alternative editions and page numbers are hidden in the code and appear in the text if “display: none ;” is deleted for the <ins> and <del> elements in the stylesheet. Introductory texts from the dust jacket flaps are collected at the end of the epub.

As this was a lot of work, I would greatly appreciate if you could send me a short message, should you find any mistakes.

Best,
pynch.


Update | v.1.1 | 29 May 2012
Fixed the Flush footnote links.

Update | v.2.0 | 3 February 2013
Added the last missing story “A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus”, corrected hundreds of mistakes in “Roger Fry” and improved its formatting, and changed the cover.

Update | v.3.0 | 6 March 2013
I have scanned and corrected all of the 383 essays that were published in magazines and newspapers but not contained in the previous essay collections, and added them to this edition. I also fixed many OCR mistakes in some of the books and replaced the font files because of a misbehaving smallcap font.

Update | v.4.0 | 29 March 2013
I have added the first two volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries which I scanned and corrected myself. They cover the years 1915-1924.

Update | v.5.0 | 21 April 2013
I have added Volumes 3 and 4 of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, covering the years 1925-1935.

Update | v.6.0 | 21 May 2013
I have added the fifth and final volume of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, covering the years 1936-1941. Additionally, I have exchanged all 33 covers (for the single books and the collection).

Update | v.6.1 | 2 Nov 2013
Checked and corrected the formatting and italics of 13 books that I couldn’t access earlier, repositioned the illustrations in Flush and Orlando, included illustrations for Three Guineas, the footnotes of Granite and Rainbow, and a missing section of the essay “The Lives of the Obscure”, and corrected a bunch of scanning mistakes in Between the Acts and A Room of One’s Own.

Update | v.7.0 | 2 Feb 2014
I have added two volumes of her letters: A Change of Perspective [Vol. III: 1923-1928] and A Reflection of the Other Person [Vol. IV: 1929-1931]. I also checked and corrected the formatting and italics of 4 more books and added the text passages in Moments of Being which were discovered later and published in the second edition.

Update | v.8.0 | 12 Apr 2014
I have added the fifth volume of her letters, The Sickle Side of the Moon, covering the years 1932 through 1935. I also included The Letters of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey (Hogarth Press, 1956) for which I sincerely thank yourdayismyday who transcribed them.

Update | v.8.1 | 17 Aug 2014
Proofed Monday or Tuesday, Jacob’s Room, A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, and To the Lighthouse against copies of early print editions and corrected hundreds of mistakes (punctuation and spelling, mostly, but also some missing words and lines).

Update | v.8.2 | 14 Sep 2014
Proofed Mrs Dalloway, The Common Reader I, On Being Ill, Between the Acts, The Moment and Other Essays, Granite and Rainbow, and Women and Writing against copies of early print editions and corrected hundreds of mistakes and variants.

Update | v.9.0 | 26 Oct 2014
I have added the sixth volume of her letters, Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead, covering the years 1936 through 1941, and proofread the 173 essays and reviews she published between 1919 and 1940. There’s also an index now of the authors whose books she reviewed.

Update | v.9.1 | 25 Jan 2015
Proofed The Waves, Flush, The Death of the Moth, and The Captain’s Death Bed against copies of Hogarth Press print editions and corrected about 800 mistakes and variants.

Update | v.9.2 | 10 Jan 2016
Proofed The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, The London Scene, The Years, Three Guineas, Freshwater, and The Complete Shorter Fiction against Hogarth Press editions, mostly, and corrected abougt 2600 mistakes and variants.

Update | v.10.0 | 14 Feb 2016
I have added the first two volumes of her letters, The Flight of the Mind and The Question of Things Happening, covering the years 1888 through 1922, and A Passionate Apprentice with the early journals 1887–1909. 31 additional letters which surfaced later in magazines have also been added.

Update | v.11.0 | 5 Feb 2017
I have revised the order of the texts, proofed Books and Portraits, A Writer’s Diary, Moments of Being, Roger Fry, The Common Reader II, and The Letters with Lytton Strachey against early English editions, made sure the texts of Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One’s Own, and Flush follow the latest editions authorised by Virginia Woolf, documented variants of alternative Hogarth editions, added the new letters in Congenial Spirits and the incomplete stories from The Complete Shorter Fiction, replaced a wrong essay, included page numbers for almost all books, and transcribed the intros from the dust jacket flaps.

Update | v.11.1 | 6 Feb 2024
Checked the first edition of Jacob’s Room and documented its variants.

Previous download count: 10316.

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[anacreon]

Thank you for your wonderful work. I've downloaded all your recent english and german productions, which are an enormous improvement on the piecemeal pieces I had downloaded previously on various sites, first for completeness, second for quality, notably in text, typography and cross-referencing. A propos cross-referencing, there is a slight hitch in Flush by Virginia Woolf: the notes all link to p2740 (the title page of The death of the moth).

I don't know whether it would go against your editorial policy, but I'd appreciate having something like the wikipedia biography among the apparatus.

[pynch]

Thanks for the comment. I fixed the Flush footnote links and uploaded a new version.

Sorry, but it does indeed go against my ‘editorial policy’ to add biographical information. It might be too early in the morning for me to try to explain this, but I think that writers publish their texts and not their lives. And as I worship their writings, anything I add could only reduce them.

[Jellby]

You may want to fix these flightcrew issues too:

The Complete Virginia Woolf.epub/OEBPS/Text/06CommonI1.htm(367): error 301: ID value 'greek' is not unique
The Complete Virginia Woolf.epub/OEBPS/Text/06CommonI1.htm(375): error 301: ID value 'greek' is not unique
The Complete Virginia Woolf.epub/OEBPS/Text/06CommonI1.htm(387): error 301: ID value 'greek' is not unique
The Complete Virginia Woolf.epub/OEBPS/Text/06CommonI1.htm(387): error 301: ID value 'greek' is not unique
The Complete Virginia Woolf.epub/OEBPS/Text/06CommonI1.htm(389): error 301: ID value 'greek' is not unique
The Complete Virginia Woolf.epub/OEBPS/Text/06CommonI1.htm(397): error 301: ID value 'greek' is not unique

[pynch]

Thanks for checking. But as nothing links to the greek-ids, there’s no fixing necessary.

[Jellby]

Well, it's not necessary, but the file is strictily not a valid ePub and could be rejected by some current or future readers.

Since nothing links to the greek-ids, why are they there are all?

[pynch]

The IDs are there because I needed to check if the font I chose later showed all the characters including the diacritics. If someone wants to change the font in his/her epub now, they can still easily look up all the instances where they appear.

As there are no complaints yet, I assume the IDs are not a problem with current readers. Considering future models sounds too hypothetical to me. And I have read several times about Sigil complaining about epubs without anyone having a problem opening them on their readers, so right now I don't intend to update it.

[Jellby]

So you don't care about validation, as long as it does not affect display (something that is often unpredictable). Well, it's your book and your choice, I won't go further into this.

But if the reason is being able to identify Greek text, I would suggest using a class or, better yet, an xml:lang attribute (although it's not properly handled by ADE). This would allow to identify the Greek fragments, and also to style them in a different way (like using an embedded or different font). When xml:lang is recognized, it also allows the reading app to use different hyphenation or text-to-speech patterns.

What I mean is something like this:

unmitigated villainess. “<span xml:lang="grc">δεινὸν τὸ τἰκτειν ἐστίν</span>,” she says

[Prestidigitweeze]

This is beautiful and exemplary work, Pynch(on?). Thanks for taking such pains.

One thing:

For consistency, shouldn't the conjunction and be lower-cased in the title, Women And Writing?

Also, the words other stories and other short stories are normally init-capped in title case, and the comma before and is unnecessary in all instances of and Other Stories and and Other Short Stories.

Other is an adjective and is also five letters, so every rule of title case applies. Ditto with short and the noun stories.

Incidentally, why are only some stories called short when all are considered short stories? Shouldn't each instance use and Other Stories, since the shortness is implied?

Also:

In your current version of the works of Oscar Wilde, I noticed in the ToC that you added a period at the end of each title. That's rather non-standard and I found it distracting in an otherwise gorgeous rendering.

Please understand that I mean these as minor criticisms which in no way diminish your meticulous work elsewhere. And thanks so much for caring about the line indents in the poetry - something which mainstream publishers seem not to get right in too many of their ePub editions.

[pynch]

Hi Prestidigitweeze (Prestigious Digital Wizard?)

Thank you very much for your kind words, and much more so for your comments, they made my day! Discussing commas and periods is what I live for (almost not kidding).

The ‘and’ in ‘Women and Writing’ should be lower-cased and will be in an update. And I will delete the ‘short’ in the ‘Haunted House’-title as that’s how Leonard Woolf named the book. But apart from ‘The Haunted House’, where else did you find ‘other (short) stories’?

I did indeed take some freedoms with the titles. Of course you’re right, the title case rule says that those titles should be init-capped, but to me it looked adequate to separate the story names from the ‘and ...’ (and Vanessa Bell seems to agree if you take a look at the original covers).

The commas before ‘and’ are not just unnecessary but plain wrong (as the Chicago Manual of Style requires a series of at least three elements for this comma to be justified), it’s just that we Crusaders for the Oxford Comma have to take exaggerated measures sometimes to agitate public opinion and prevail in the end. For more information on our motives, please have a look here (If anyone wants to apply for a membership, send me a PM and I will send you the necessary forms).

Regarding the periods after the Oscar Wilde title, I could swear that I’ve seen those quite often, but can’t find a single example at the moment, so perhaps I have just dreamt those periods. Still, I hope you can get used to them, as I would like to leave them where they are.

Best, pynch.

PS: No, I am not Thomas Pynchon. And yes, that’s where my user name comes from, along with a 1972 Can song.

[pynch]

Originally Posted by pynch

Regarding the periods after the Oscar Wilde title, I could swear that I’ve seen those quite often, but can’t find a single example at the moment, so perhaps I have just dreamt those periods.

I found them! I found them! I’m not psychotic! I knew I only learnt it from the best! There have to be periods after titles now and forever, because they were used for Shakespeare’s First Folio.

[Prestidigitweeze]

I wanted to write a more appreciative and detailed note to your previous response, but for the team buying, I feel I must point out with a vigorous stabbing gesture that, in the case of the folio's ToC, periods are being used as abbreviated leaders.

And I'm quite happy your pet e-reader is a PRS-350, as that's the device I've been using to revel in your conscientious work.

[pynch]

PYN (dying). What does thou mean with ‘abbreviated leaders’, Wizard? I no speak English. (Dies not yet.)

[Prestidigitweeze]

Judging by your devilish eye for details, epub virtuosity and zest for archaisms/humorous convolutions, I'd say you're a superb candidate for rendering the works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Besides which, I'd love to see what you did with the indent levels of his stanzas. At the very least, have a look and see if you like reading him (if you haven't already).

The gist tilts across its virtual page here.

§§§§§§§§§§§§

As for those elusive leaders, here's an info drip from Wikipedia:

Printed tables of contents indicate page numbers where each part starts, while digital ones offer links to go to each part. The format and location of the page numbers is a matter of style for the publisher. If the page numbers appear after the heading text, they might be preceded by characters called leaders, usually dots or periods, that run from the chapter or section titles on the opposite side of the page, or the page numbers might remain closer to the titles. In some cases, the page number appears before the text.

In other words:



I call yours abbreviated leaders because you've whittled stippled lines to single dots.

And in case you're wondering whether your diction and references to dying (in the suggestive Renaissance madrigal sense) have found a kindred ferret, have a leer at this poetic artifact.

I'd also be interested in knowing whether you happen to write poetry and/or fiction. Feel free to PM me on that subject.

[pynch]

As censorship, and even self-censorship (be it for misplaced devotion or other reasons), must not be condoned on MR, I’d like to put the link to Prestidigitweeze’s recommended essay on Beddoes back here.

And as we don’t seem to be able to make this a broad discussion on periods and commas (but I’m still hoping for the big battle on apostrophes some day), I’ll continue this privately.