In the final months of her life, Virginia Woolf started to write a history of English literature she never lived to finish. This project, extant only as a constellation of fragmentary drafts, has come to be known by the dual title of ‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’. This history is not patterned around the writings of singular named authors like Chaucer and Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf. Rather, it stems from the ‘nameless vitality’ of Anon, the unnamed poet-singer whose voice precedes and makes possible literature in English. In this project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, I aim to create the first complete edition of this late archive, deploying genetic and digital editorial methodologies in order to best portray the richly generative textuality of this archive.
PI: Joshua Phillips, University of Oxford. Project funded by Leverhulme Grant ECF-2022-602.
Website under construction: accessible at https://digitalanon.web.ox.ac.uk.
Archival material © Estate of Virginia Woolf 2022. My thanks to the Estate and the Society of Authors for their permission to use this material.