This May will mark 100 years since the publication of Virginia Woolf’s day-in-the-life novel Mrs Dalloway. To celebrate the occasion, the book is being published by Vintage Classics in a special hardback set that also includes A Room of One’s Own and To the Lighthouse, all of which feature the original cover artworks based on woodcut prints by the author’s sister, artist Vanessa Bell.

“Very few book covers endure across a century but Vanessa Bell’s artwork for her sister Virginia Woolf is still amazingly fresh and recognisable 100 years later,” says Charlotte Knight, editorial director at Vintage Classics. “On the occasion of the 100^th birthday of Mrs Dalloway it seemed right to go all the way back to the cover designs for Woolf’s first editions.”

The two sisters were part of the Bloomsbury Group, a band of artists, literary figures, and thinkers that was prolific during the early 20^th century and has remained a fixture of cultural interest ever since – particularly as significant anniversaries arise, offering opportunities to reflect on their legacy. A 2023 exhibition curated by Charlie Porter celebrated the group’s influence on fashion design, while Tate Britain is staging an another show later this year that will explore the life and work of Bell and her partner Duncan Grant.

“I think the enduring appeal of Vanessa Bell’s artwork is connected to the ongoing fascination with the Bloomsbury Set and how they defined an era,” Knight says. However, she suspects the longevity of the cover designs is also owing to the sisters’ unique creative relationship. “The covers are so evocative of a particular moment in both art and literature – the modernism of artist and writer come together. Two deeply creative and experimental sisters collaborated to make something that was strikingly new and fresh then, and still is today.”

Thankfully, the team, overseen by creative director Suzanne Dean, chose not to erase all of the charming details in the name of ‘finessing’. By maintaining the distinctly hand-rendered shapes and the textural grain of analogue printmaking, the new designs feel faithful to Bell’s original vision and process.

Yet this was not simply a replication job; there was still subtle intervention from the team, particularly given the age of the source material. “It was quite a complicated process to source scans of the first edition dust jackets and piece them together to make the new covers. We used scans from several sources so that we could fill in the gaps where torn sections had been lost,” Knight explains.

 

“The spines were a challenge – we had to create a new design for the spine of Mrs Dalloway as we didn’t have enough width to match the original,” she continues. “The spine for A Room of One’s Own was much plainer than the other two and so we added some little details taken from the front cover. So these are not facsimile editions but we have made reference to the first editions in every detail of the design and production, from the typeface used in the typesetting, to the choice of paper, to the colour of the cover boards.”

Though the books are published by one of the world’s biggest publishing companies, the new set draws a direct link back to the first editions published by Hogarth Press – Woolf’s own publishing house (later acquired by Chatto & Windus, now a Penguin Random House imprint) – through these design details and the texts themselves, which are the original Hogarth Press versions. “In reviving the original covers we are showcasing a classic and beloved piece of design but also celebrating a long and proud publishing history,” says Knight.

The Virginia Woolf special hardback gift editions are published by Vintage Classics on May 1; penguin.co.uk