SOURCE: de Gay, Jane. “An Unfinished Story: The Freshwater Drafts of ‘The Searchlight.’” In Virginia Woolf: Turning the Centuries, edited by Ann Ardis and Bonnie Kime Scott, pp. 207-15. New York: Pace University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, de Gay traces the revision of “The Searchlight” into “A Scene from the Past,” and contends that the final version deserves more critical attention than it has been given.

This paper will focus on a collection of drafts relating to Woolf's short story “The Searchlight,” which differ significantly from the version published by Leonard Woolf in A Haunted House (1943). Unlike the published version, which is set in London in the 1930s, these drafts describe a scene at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight in the 1860s amongst the circle of Woolf's great-aunt, the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Although the recent publication of one of the drafts in the Virginia...