Near the end of A Room of One's Own, in a coda as cunning and surprising as any of Beethoven's, Virginia Woolf declares, ‘The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their subtlety. I like their anonymity. I like – but I must not run on in this way.’ Or so the passage appears in the special limited edition published in the United States on 21 October 1929 and in Britain on 24 October, in the British and American first editions (also published 24 October), and in all subsequent American editions. Yet in the second British impression, published less than a month later, on 9 November 1929, Woolf liked ‘their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity’. This revised version continued to appear in all British editions of the text until January 1992, fifty years after her death, when Virginia Woolf's work came out of copyright in Britain. In new editions published by Penguin and Oxford World's Classics, editions that reset the text from the British first edition, Woolf reverted to liking women's ‘subtlety’.

As the general editor of the Penguin reprints, I was one of those responsible for the decision to return to the text of the first British edition on the grounds that this would be a practical way of shedding the accumulated errors of later editions. This decision seemed further justified by the widespread assumption that, though Woolf revised her work extensively in the stages before and sometimes during publication, she lost interest in it thereafter, so that any post-publication changes that occurred were probably non-authorial. Since 1992, however, I have become steadily less confident of this assumption: an example such as I began with must call it in question, while the assumption has itself functioned to deter further investigation into Woolf’s post-publication revisions.