Editing Hardy

Abstract

The Phrase “editing Hardy” encompasses a range of very different tasks: Hardy's private notebooks, for example, pose some editorial problems not at all characteristic of his correspondence, and there are similar differences in the problems involved in editing his poetry as opposed to his prose fiction. In fact, somewhere in the course of “editing Hardy” one can probably find an example of almost every major kind of problem which editors of Victorian authors are likely to confront. In the space of one essay it would be of course hopeless to attempt a detailed consideration of all the various questions Hardy's texts pose for editors; yet any discussion of editing Hardy that did not attempt to come to grips with at least some of the specific editorial problems editors face would scarcely be more than a summary account of current progress. This essay, therefore, provides a general survey of the present state of the scholarly editing of Hardy's texts, but it also includes a more detailed consideration of current theory and practice in editing Hardy's prose fiction which focuses on the question of copy-text choice and uses examples drawn from the texts of Far from the Madding Crowd to illustrate one aspect of that problem.