8 January 2016

mrs dalloway

This is the second page of a draft of Mrs Dalloway. The text is here at Project Guttenberg. Reading a few sentences (eg. ‘She advanced, light, tall, very upright, to be greeted at once by button-faced Miss Pym, whose hands were always bright red, as if they had been stood in cold water with the flowers. There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were irises. Ah yes–so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind’) shows that even this manuscript page was changed by Virginia Woolf before publication. There is a good BBC programme in which Alexandra Harris looks at the original manuscript in the British Library here.