Do periódico ao livro centenário

a autoedição de Virginia Woolf em The Common Reader

Abstract

 This article investigates the practice we call self-editing, as observed in the essays of the British writer Virginia Woolf, whose short non-fiction prose works, previously less considered than her novels and even short stories, have been gaining ground in criticism. Here we analyze details of the phenomenon of editing and revising one of the author’s famous essays when it goes from its first version, published in the British press, more specifically in the Times Literary Supplement, to its more properly canonical version, as part of the collection of essays The Common Reader: First Series (1925), which celebrates the one hundredth anniversary of its original publication in 2025. Through textual comparison, we analyzed the changes, some simple, others severe, focusing on the meanings that are constructed by the different versions of the text, in an attempt to reveal trends in the self-editing promoted by the author as the text, previously published in a mass media outlet, could now be reworked for a book by her own publishing house, the Hogarth Press, where she had much more freedom to publish in the way she saw fit.