A Variant Edition of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove

Abstract

<p>In 1908, Henry James prepared a revised version of The Wings of the Dove {1902) as part of the New York Edition of his works. Despite the notoriety of James's habit of revision, and despite the high critical status of the novel as one of James's major works, no scholarly edition of the novel exists. This study attempts to supply such an edition by presenting the text of the first printing of The Wings of the Dove, together with a complete list of substantive variants in the two other editions supervised by the author.</p> <p>There are three forms in which the text of The Wings of the Dove is available: the first American edition (Scribner's, 1902); the first English edition (Constable, 1902); and the New York Edition (Scribner's, 1909). This study refers to these three editions as A, C and N, respectively. The history of the text shows that A, while the first to be published, is not the first printed; moreover, it lacks some of the final corrections which James made in his proofsheets of C. Hence, C, the first text to be printed and the one which contains all of his corrections of 1902, has been chosen as the copy-text for this edition.</p> <p>In addition to a brief discussion of the textual variants, the introduction to this edition presents all the available authorial aids to understanding the novel. Acomplete history of James's composition and publication of The Wings of the Dove, from his first Notebook entries of 1894 to the revision of the novel in 1908, is reconstructed here from published and unpublished letters of the period. A section devoted to analysis of James's epistolary comments on the novel and of his one published critique, the Preface to the New York Edition of The Wings of the Dove_, reveals inconsistencies which are ultimately related to the long and intermittent period over which the novel was composed. Finally, examination of some of James's revisions leads to the conclusion that most of the substantive variants are stylistic in effect, but that the remainder clarify or add to the meaning of particular passages.</p> <p>The text of the first English edition of The Wings of the Dove (C) is reproduced here as this edition's reading text. The correct forms of misprints in C are given in the lateral margins. The substantive variants in A and Nare listed in the lower margins of the pages on which the orginal text appears. This variant edition presents, for the first time, and in convenient form, all the authorial versions of the text of The Wings of the Dove.</p>