The Voyage Out

The UK Duckworth 1915 is the true first and the census claim is confirmed, including the textual point. The first American edition — George H. Doran Company, New York, 1920 — is textually distinct because Woolf revised the novel for it, and both editions are collected. The revision is well evidenced: two copies of the 1915 first survive carrying Woolf's own manuscript alterations made ahead of the American issue, one in a private US collection and one at the University of Sydney, the latter with her notes and deletions in violet ink. The revision was occasioned by the US International Copyright Act of 1891, which required American issues of British books to be reset and printed in the United States rather than printed from British plates — the same mechanism that produced textual divergence across Woolf's American editions generally.