Princeton UP to Publish Early Stories by Virginia Woolf
In October, Princeton University Press will publish The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories by Virginia Woolf. The collection features Woolf’s early forays into experimental fiction, marking the first time they have been published in one comprehensive volume.
Organized as three interconnected comic stories, The Life of Violet appears in the NYPL’s Berg Collection as a draft manuscript under the name Friendship’s Gallery (1907), and as far as Woolf scholars knew, was never intended for publication. The story’s heroine, a “laughing giantess” who tends to her magic garden, is loosely modeled on her friend Mary Violet Dickinson, and was likely meant as “little more than an inside joke,” according to a press release. Unbeknownst to scholars, however, Woolf and Dickinson returned to the draft in 1908 and made painstaking, handwritten revisions in the margins.
The Life of Violet also includes a preface and afterword by editor Urmila Seshagiri that provides historical, literary, and biographical context.
