Teaching with Woolf Online

The pilot project- focused on Part II, the "Time Passes" section of the novel-was envisioned and originated by Professor Julia Briggs at the Centre for Textual Scholarship at De Montfort University. On the site are facsimile images and transcriptions of the holograph drafts (http://www.woolfonline.com/?node=content&project=1&taxa=6) in three notebooks housed in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, making these extremely fragile and now severely restricted materials widely accessible, one valuable contribution that digital archives can make to scholarship and teaching. The site includes as well the typescripts, proofs, and various early editions of the novel, and a wealth of contextual material, such as diary entries and letters pertaining to the novel, early reviews of To the Lighthouse, selected essays Woolf wrote over the two-year period she worked on the novel (she wrote some 60 essays during that time), and photographs of the Stephen family, Cornwall, and Talland House, which inform the setting and characters of the novel. Through the typescript, the proofs, and the various editions along with the contextual material, one can almost literally watch Virginia Woolf create the manuscript, write in her diary, pen letters, compose other works-such as her essay "How Should One Read a Book?," a draft of which is in the holograph notebooks-and read accounts of contemporaneous events, such as the General Strike that was going on practically outside the writer's windows as she wrote the "Time Passes" section in May 1926 (http://www.woolfonline.com/?node=content/contextual/gallery&project =1&parent=35&taxa=36).