“Women Must Weep”: The Serialization of Three Guineas

Abstract

When I agreed to edit Three Guineas for Blackwell’s Shakespeare Head Press edition of Virginia Woolf, I knew that the task would be complicated by the rather complex history of the texts, but I believed that the serialization would be the least of my problems. The book started in January 1931 as a lecture and then developed along with Virginia Woolf’s hugely successful 1937 novel The Years. Between 1931 and 1937, while concentrating on the novel, Woolf collected materials for what began as a book about women and professions; from time to time, she jotted down notes and fragments of draft. A slightly fictionalized and fully documented version of the factual underpinning of The Years, Three Guineas itself was finally completed in the winter of 1937 and spring of 1938. Soon after, it was published in slightly different versions, first in Britain and then the United States. In addition, it was serialized in two instalments under the title “Women Must Weep”, in the American magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, in May and June 1938, overlapping with the appearance of the English and American first editions in June and August respectively.