Cover stories: Melymbrosia, Bloomsbury Group, Living Texts

*June will see the deeply controversial publication of Melymbrosia, a book claimed by its editor Louise DeSalvo to be Virginia Woolf's first novel. DeSalvo (author of Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work) maintains that this text from 1912 about a young woman travelling abroad stands as a complete novel, whose radicalism was then toned down by the worried Woolf to form her published debut, The Voyage Out (1915). DeSalvo asserts that Woolf was warned that the original novel's frankness about homosexuality, and its criticisms of colonialism, could wreck her fledgling career. But critics argue that these stitched-together manuscript extracts were never meant as a single, separate work. Watch out for scholarly explosions when Cleis Press publishes early next month.

*Interest in the Bloomsbury Group seems never to wane, so it is astonishing that work remains unpublished. But a collection of writings by Vita Sackville-West, half previously unseen, will also be released next month by Palgrave. Edited by Mary Ann Caws, A Queer Collection gathers short stories, travel notebooks, essays, poems and diaries by the woman now best known for her Sissinghurst garden. The book includes pieces about Virginia Woolf and Violet Trefusis. It is prefaced by Sackville-West's son, Nigel Nicolson, who wrote about his parents' relationship in Portrait of a Marriage.

*Need a little help for that competitive book group? Back when English A-Level meant The Mayor of Casterbridge or some ribald but tedious chunk of Chaucer, we all reached for study guides published by Coles, Brodie, or York. Increasingly, however, syllabuses specify modern classics, such as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale or Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong. But such novels are ill-served by existing guides. Rescue arrives in the form of the new Living Texts series, in the final stages of preparation by Random House. These guides, while designed to reflect the National Curriculum, are likely to appeal also to university students, and those who take their reading group seriously. The idea was put to publisher Caroline Michel by Dr Margaret Reynolds of Queen Mary College, London, and Jonathan Noakes, director of studies at Eton. Material was soon being road-tested and the first four Living Texts – on Atwood, de Bernières, Faulks and McEwan – are scheduled for late summer, in Vintage paperback.