Woolf Online: An Electronic Edition and Commentary of Virginia Woolf's 'Time Passes'.

During the last thirty years or more, Virginia Woolf's fiction has generated a massive body of criticism, but surprisingly little of it has drawn upon the extraordinary wealth of surviving source material that Woolf left behind, and the detailed information it can yield as to how her work came to be written. This pilot project took as its case study a highly experimental passage from one of the greatest twentieth century novels in the English language 'Time Passes', which formed the central sequence from Virginia Woolf's novel 'To the Lighthouse' (1927). Virginia Woolf composed the first draft between 30th April and 25th May 1926, with an interval of four days, between 10th and 13th May, when she was working on an article on De Quincey for the TLS. The project aimed to bring together the different stages of writing that went into the making of 'Time Passes' to create a record of its development in the form of a genetic edition of the text, and to embed that edition in a network of histories and contexts that reconfigured traditional annotation techniques as a system of linked but separate strands of thought, thus producing a new form of literary archaeology.

This pilot project, the pre-cursor to this site, is available at the following URL,