"On or about December 1910 human character changed," Virginia Woolf famously declared. Gone, she wrote, were the old certainties, the old manners, the deference to nineteenth-century authority. Instead human beings—at least the ones in Woolf's circle—were starting to see the world as full of chaos and discontinuity. Einstein smashed the notion of a... See more

Here is what happens in 1930 to the first sentence of 1926: very little, almost nothing. There are some small changes to punctuation, as when “arm chair” acquires a hyphen. In a sentence that is governed in its opening lines by the (somewhat confusing) play of light and dark, Woolf avoids a minor repetition when she writes “what wastes and deserts

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“literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, negligible and nonexisent.” We lack a language to capture “this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain,” and if we t

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