Senior English lecturer Jane Goldman, working with Susan Sellers of St Andrews University's English department, has won a prestigious contract to produce a new, landmark edition of the novels of Virginia Woolf.
The edition, published by Cambridge University Press, will supersede all previously available modern versions of Woolf's novels. It will provide much-needed clean texts with comprehensive scholarly notes that trace, often for the first time, Woolf's references and allusions.
Jane, whose previous studies of Woolf have included authoring The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf and contributing to a number of other titles, said: "It is amazing that Virginia Woolf's work hasn't been thoroughly edited before now but it's quite true. Woolf is an avant-garde writer of enormous stature, a feminist icon, and a legendary critic, whose work has transformed our culture. 'A Room of One's Own', for example, is embedded in the language as cultural shorthand for feminist agendas. She was an artist of genius. There has been sustained scholarly interest in Woolf since the 1940s, and in the last decade she has received an enormous amount of critical attention. But her work has been treated with less editorial care than that of any other major twentieth-century writer".
Professor Susan Sellers, recent winner of a 2002 Canongate Prize for fiction, whose previous academic works include ‘Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women's Fiction’, said: "I hope our edition will explode some of the myths about Virginia Woolf. You still hear critics suggest that she was uneducated. In fact, the breadth and depth of her learning was phenomenal. Our edition will show the extent to which she embedded complex allusions to classical, historical, and literary works within her writing."
Virginia Woolf's novels were groundbreaking modernist achievements in their experimental use of narrative techniques and forms, and their development of a new language and manner to articulate modern women's experience. Recent films Mrs Dalloway and The Hours, starring Nicole Kidman, pay homage to Woolf's psychological insight and personal charisma. 'To the Lighthouse', set on the Isle of Skye, is one of Woolf's most famous novels, and will be among the first published in the landmark Cambridge edition, which aims to issue its first title in 2006.
"We're delighted that the universities of St Andrews and Dundee will be collaborating on this project," said Jane. "This is one of the biggest and most important editing projects of our generation. It will be a huge task, over many years, but immensely rewarding. Until now, American and British scholars haven't been reading from the same sheet - they deserve to have a reliable reference edition. But, most importantly, the work of Virginia Woolf, herself a great scholar, deserves finally to be accorded the respect and detailed attention that the Cambridge edition represents."