Authorial Choice and Modes of Circulation

Abstract

Authorial Choice and Modes of Circulation Emily C. Friedman, Pam Perkins, and Peter Sabor all three of these essays explore authorial choice—particularly, the choice to withhold part or all of a text from print. Peter Sabor and Pam Perkins examine this issue through specific case studies. Sabor discusses Frances Burney d'Arblay's neglected labor as editor of her own correspondence and that of her father during the final decades of her life. Perkins focuses on Eliza Dawson Fletcher's production of works that circulated among Edinburgh's literary elite but either did not pass into print or were not originally intended for commercial sale and distribution. Emily C. Friedman's essay pulls back from the individual case study to consider the production of manuscript fiction more generally. It is clear that there is more to be studied about the world of writing and editing beyond print. In these essays, we start to see ways of reframing the world of print as not necessarily intimidating to women writers but instead antithetical to certain forms of creative work. The nature of commercial print means strictures on scale and content; the length of some of the manuscripts Friedman has identified suggests that authors could indulge in a degree of creative and compositional exuberance outside the constraints of publishers' demands and expectations. As Sabor demonstrates in his account of Henry Colburn's attempts to wrestle d'Arblay's (and Charlotte Barrett's) editorial work down to a manageable number of volumes, once a writer chose to seek commercial publication, financial considerations inevitably inflected her editorial and creative decisions. Yet a decision to forgo commercial circulation did not necessarily imply a willing or resigned acceptance of literary obscurity as a trade-off for creative freedom. Perkins reminds us that writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could build a reputation outside this world of mass print, which, [End Page 85] as scholars like Leah Orr have shown us, was not entirely "mass" to begin with, in the case of many literary forms.1 In a world of still-modest print runs, valorizing print (and, indeed, only certain forms of print, as other essay clusters in this special issue show) does a disservice to the realities of literary circulation. These three essays suggest that paying attention to manuscript and noncommercial print culture can open up our understanding of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modes of literary labor. The obscure or unidentified writers that Friedman discusses might have been writing for tiny, private audiences of family members and close friends, but theirs were compositions that they, or the recipients, took seriously enough to preserve. Fletcher's literary reputation was, at least for a time, much higher than that of many now-forgotten authors of printed minor Gothic novels or overlooked volumes of poems. D'Arblay's move into editorial work might be read as a retreat, or an advance, from more conventional ideas of literary creativity; despite the great length of three of her four novels (all but Evelina were first published in five volumes), her journals and letters eclipse them in extent, with the standard modern edition extending to twenty-five volumes. Yet, for better or worse, she left this huge mass of material, as well as her eight plays, in manuscript form during her lifetime. Recognizing the seriousness with which d'Arblay herself took her roles as editor, biographer, and life writer opens the way to recovering her own more inclusive understanding of literary work. Although these essays tend to focus on women writers, the question of whether to circulate one's work in manuscript or in print is not an issue limited to women, as Friedman points out. Here, attending to the cases of women writers illuminates use cases by unknown or unnamed writers whose individuality is lost to us, through the vagaries of how their work survives (or does not) in modern archives and collections. [End Page 86] Footnotes This response forms part of a special issue: "Women in Book History, 1660–1830," ed. Betty A. Schellenberg and Michelle Levy, Huntington Library Quarterly 84, no. 1 (2021). To read the essays in the issue, follow this link: https://muse...