See how Virginia Woolf revised her first novel

Writing a novel isn’t easy, especially when you’re doing it with the backdrop of childhood trauma and when you’re a woman writing in an era of significant gender inequality.

So it’s no surprise that author Virginia Woolf had a heck of a time with her first novel, The Voyage Out.

The book came out in 1915 in the UK, but all the reworking Woolf had previously done didn't turn out to be enough for her — she made more revisions for the US version, which came out in 1920.

And as it turns out, she literally marked up and pasted in passages in copies of the UK edition to do that.

The Guardian reports that one of those copies was purchased by the Fisher Library Rare Books Collection at the University of Sydney in the 1970s — and then misfiled.

There's a happy ending, though! Woolf's manually revised copy of The Voyage Out was recently rediscovered and digitized, so everyone can take a look at Woolf's work.

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