8. Drafting ‘Anon’ and Killing Anon

This chapter examines the unfinished drafts of the literary history that Virginia Woolf worked on in the final year of her life, a project that Woolf variously termed ‘Reading at Random’ and ‘Turning the Page’ but which has come to be known by the dual title of ‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader.’ Specifically, this chapter posits that through its content and its form, the drafts of ‘Anon’ dramatize the work of genetic narratology, and doubly so. In the draft pages of her literary history, Woolf crafts a narrative for the genesis of literature in English and English as a literary language. The moment of English literature’s birth is the moment of Anon’s death: Woolf’s genetic narrative sees her figuration for the pre-literate oral tradition, Anon killed at the moment William Caxton begins to print books with authorial signatures. This incipit moment does not exist in one stable form. Rather, it is narrated multiple times in multiple drafts which attest to Woolf’s ongoing attempts to think through her literary history as she writes. First, this essay gives a brief overview of the corpus of drafts Woolf left at the time of her death. It then zooms in to examine various renditions of the moments at which Anon emerges and when Anon is killed. It reads across these variants, tracing the ways in which Woolf theorises and re-theorises the development of English literature and of English literary language as she drafts and redrafts the primal scene(s) of English literature. The fragments afford a vivid insight into Woolf’s slow thinking-through of English literary history. In so doing, they show the affordances of genetic narratology and the resources it can provide for reading literary drafts.