The Little Warrior (variorum edition) (PDF, 4,732 KB)
The Little Warrior (Jill the Reckless in the UK) is Wodehouse's longest book ever. At more than 117,000 words in its most complete form it is even longer than Mike, which is in reality two novels rolled into one. This variorum edition—the fourth of its kind published in this blog—analyzes four versions (two magazines and two books), and not surprisingly it has a bulky apparatus, with 1250 footnotes. It has taken a very long time: if I recall correctly, I have been working on it intermittently for the last two and a half years.
However, the edition itself is not as complex as those of other, shorter novels. A close look at the apparatus will show that the vast majority of the changes between the longest version and the rest are mere deletions, some of them substantial, and never affect the plot or the characterization. Even the dialectal differences between British and American texts are relatively scarce, more so than in the case of other books with a double edition; and apart from that the cases of rewriting are minimal. One suspects that most if not all of the changes are due not to Wodehouse but to his editors.
There is a difference of almost 4,000 words between the US book (used as base text here) and its British counterpart. It is a pity that the full version was not reprinted again after the 1920s: all later official editions, including the current Everyman/Overlook and Penguin, have the shorter version. Fortunately the novel was early enough that digitized copies are easily found on the internet, not to mention the Gutenberg project (and print-on-demand services picked it up immediately), but still it would be nice to have a proper edition of the American text.
I suppose this variorum is even more riddled with errors than usual. I will probably review it at some point in the future. Some of the texts I would like to check in case they contain any interesting changes are the (first) Canadian version in Maclean's, and the few British editions published, Autograph and Everyman/Overlook. I also think that I omitted to mention some notable typesetter's errors. But for the moment I'd rather let this text rest for a while and turn to something fresh.
