Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Hilary Havens's Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel is the first extensive study of the collaborative nature of authorship and the practice of revision in mid-to-late eighteenth-century through early nineteenth-century English novels. While scholars have often envisioned the “novelist as a powerful, singular figure” and imagined writers, particularly Romantic poets, composing their works and revising them in isolation, Havens addresses not only edits to unpublished novel manuscripts, but also post-publication revisions to depict authorship as collective and dependent upon a writer's network—from family and friends, to readers and reviewers (11). Havens's model of “networked authorship” situates novelists and their interlocutors as a “fluid group” working together on a text. Havens values the convention of “versioning,” in which maintaining multiple versions of a text reveals not only an author's networks, but also “self-collaboration” and the importance of “recycled and reworked material” (2–3). As Haven explains, “Revision is not a unidirectional action that moves...