Edward
Garnett, shown here in this 1917 photograph, read Virginia Woolf’s
manuscript, The Voyage Out, for Duckworth and Company and recommended
it be published. Woolf’s half-brother, Gerald Duckworth, had set
up his own publishing house in 1898 and published Woolf’s first
novel in 1915. The Voyage Out was completed two weeks before her marriage
and was dedicated to her husband Leonard Woolf. Originally called “Melymbrosia,”
the novel was written “end to end five or six times,” according
to Leonard Woolf.
By 1930 when the bookseller William Jackson asked Woolf
to autograph his copy of The Voyage Out, she had just finished writing
The Waves.
Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College
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