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In 1915 Virginia Woolf published her first novel, Voyage Out. It is a story about a young woman, Rachel Vinrace, who slowly enters the adult world of love and experience. Seven years before this publication, Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) began a novel called Melymbrosia. It is also the story of Rachel's emotional and spiritual emergence. Voyage Out was a success; Melymbrosia disappeared, as if it had never been written. Then, in the 1980s, Louise De Salvo, a noted Woolf scholar, began the hard work of putting together the pieces--literally: Woolf had "cannibalized" certain passages of the earlier novel for Voyage Out. De Salvo had to find the passages Woolf had cut out with scissors and pasted over to the new manuscript. "It appeared that she had taken that former version, dismantled it, cut its pages into pieces, rearranged them ..." as she wrote Voyage Out. Piecing together Melymbrosia took De Salvo seven years of close reading, as she found missing passages, sometimes whole pages, in various places (in some cases, handwritten copy or a later typescript). This was a lot of work, but it was worth the effort.
Reading the two novels side by side reveals that...