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Editing Virginia Woolf James M. Haule and J. H. Stape, eds. Editing Virginia Woolf: Interpreting the Modernist Text. New York: Palgrave, 2002. xiv + 198 pp. $62.00
IN RECENT YEARS, several important twentieth-century authors have been honored by scholarly editions of both their published works and their manuscripts. Often these editorial projects were accompanied by assessments of textual and editorial problems and, more generally, by constructions of editorial theories. Authors thus treated include W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence. English studies have profited immensely from these labors; at the same time quite a few irritations have arisen. There was a polemical debate between Richard J. Finneran and Warwick Gould over the edition of Yeats's poems. A pitched battle was fought between Hans Walter Gabler and John E. Kidd over Joyce's Ulysses. The Cambridge D. H. Lawrence edition was bitterly criticized by scholars not invited to participate. A new edition of Virginia Woolf s novels promises to be another contested field; again there are indications of editorial quarrels.
In their introduction to Editing Virginia Woolf, James M. Haule and J. H. Stape level their guns at the Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf for failing to recognize the existence of their own project, the Shakespeare Head Press Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. More generally, they condemn all previous editions, the Hogarth Collected Edition, the Oxford World's Classics series and the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, because they are textually unreliable. Haule and Stape's collection is essentially a defense of the Shakespeare Head edition; with one exception, all its contributors are involved in the project. Haule and Stape are conservative critics at heart; with some reservations they profess to adhere to what they call the "Greg-Bowers-Tanselle tradition." They do not intend to revolutionize editorial theory. They and, with one notable exception, their contributors are deeply entrenched pragmatists who, in Editing Virginia Woolf, have taken the opportunity to set out the rationale for their editorial and textual labors.
The scope and quality of the contributions varies considerably. Three very interesting essays are those by Morris Beja and the two editors, which are devoted to an anomaly peculiar to the publication of Virginia Woolf s novels. The first editions oÃ- Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, The Waves, and To...