Editor's Note
Hilary Havens’s book, Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Authorship from Manuscript to Print, was published in 2019 with Cambridge University Press. In it, she recovers and analyzes material from novel manuscripts and post-publication revisions to identify a form of ‘networked authorship’. By tracing authors’ revisions to their novels, the influence of familial and literary circles, reviewers, and authors’ own previous writings can be discerned. The book focuses on the work of Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and Maria Edgeworth to challenge the individualistic view of authorship that arose during the Romantic period, and argues that networked authorship shaped the composition of eighteenth-century novels.
With Jessica Richard, Susan Egenolf, and Robin Runia, Hilary Havens is one of the editors of Maria Edgeworth Letters, an NEH-funded digital edition of the correspondence of Maria Edgeworth. Members of the public can contribute to this project by transcribing Edgeworth’s letters through the Zooniverse platform. She is also the editor of Didactic Novels and British Women’s Writing, 1790-1820 (Routledge, 2017), and she is the co-editor of the correspondence of Samuel Richardson and Edward Young, which is forthcoming in volume 8 of the Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. Dr. Havens is under contract with Cambridge University Press to produce two editions of Frances Burney’s Cecilia, an academic edition and a student edition.