Orlando by Virginia Woolf

night of 17 March 1928. 2 She then revised it completely, while retaining most of the narrative structure of the first draft (some details of the passages she later cut can be found in the notes to this edition). A number of extracts from the original manuscript have subsequently been published: the first (a sequence from Chapter V that begins with an apologetic note from Miss Christina Rossetti) by Vita Sackville-West in an article for the
Listener
in 1955, based on a radio programme. 3 Transcripts of many passages that differ in the manuscript from the printed text are provided by Madeline Moore in her article on the subject. 4 The manuscript remains in perpetuity at Knole, the Sackville family estate at Sevenoaks, Kent, as part of a bequest to the National Trust from Vita’s sons, Ben and Nigel Nicolson.
    Woolf sent Vita a special leather-bound copy of
Orlando
on the morning of publication, 11 October 1928, the day on which the novel’s last chapter takes place and Orlando arrives at the present time; she also gave Vita the manuscript. The first British edition of
Orlando
was published by the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press, having been printed in Edinburgh (by R. & R. Clark, Ltd), and the first American trade edition was published by Harcourt, Brace and Co. on 18 October, though both this and the Hogarth volume were preceded by a special limited edition, published on 2 October by Crosby Gaige of New York who printed 861 copies and a further 15 on green paper. 5 The American edition of
Orlando
differs in a large number of significant details from the British text. It was Woolf’s practice to revise page-proofs for her British and American publishers independently, with theresult that there are more than 150 variant readings. A list of these is given in an appendix to this volume. The page-proofs that Woolf corrected for Harcourt Brace are at Smith College. Some pages of the corrected typescript survive in private hands, several having been purchased by Frederick B. Adams, an American railways director. 6
    Orlando
sold exceptionally well – more than 8,000 copies in Britain and more than 13,000 in the United States during its first six months. As Woolf’s biographer John Mepham points out, it was ‘the turning point in her career from the point of view of sales’. During her lifetime
Orlando,
along with
Flush
(1933, her spoof biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel) and
The Years
(1937), sold best, but this pattern changed after the war when these titles were overtaken by the more serious modernism of
Mrs. Dalloway
(1925) and
To the Lighthouse
(1927). 7 Later editions of
Orlando
include the Uniform Edition (1933, strictly not a new edition, since it was a photo-offset reprint); the first Penguin edition of 1942, which identified Woolf as the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen KCB and the wife of Leonard Woolf, cost nine pence and ran to 75,000 copies; there was also an edition in the Signet Classic series (New American Library) with an introduction by Elizabeth Bowen (1960). Harcourt Brace then published in paperback for Harvest Books an edition that, exceptionally, reproduced the original photographs; more than 38,000 of these were printed between October 1973 and December 1976.
    This edition is based on the text of the first English (Hogarth) edition, with the following errors corrected (the first reading is from this Penguin edition, the second from the first English edition).
    102.34    blank verse poem  ]  blank version poem
    131.26    seem to hint  ]  seems to hint
      218.6    strangers, but a little wary  ]  strangers, but a little weary
NOTES
    1.
Diary,
III, 18 March 1928, p. 177.
    2. See Letter to Vita Sackville-West, 9 Oct. 1927,
Letters,
III, pp. 428–9; and
Diary,
III, 5 and 22 Oct. 1927, p. 161. The MS ends with the date ‘March 17th 1928’; see also Letter to Vita Sackville-West, 20? March 1928,
Letters,
III, p. 474, and the diary entry, ‘Orlando was finished yesterday