The Hidden Hand; or, Sharon Harris, Editor

Abstract

If Sherry Harris's retirement marks the end of an era, her assuming the editorship (with Karen Dandurand) of in 1996 marked the beginning of a new era in the journal's history. Her advent was a characteristically quiet one, unheralded by even an editor's note. Her accomplishments were largely unremarked, as if they had been effected by a hidden hand, a metaphor that links her to the work she loved and to Adam Smith's economic theories of an apparently self-regulating and non-coercive market. In this brief tribute, I want to expose Sharon Harris's fingerprints as they have touched our own marketplace, this network of scholarly publication and affiliation that apparently functions seamlessly and effortlessly. In 1984 began as a newsletter produced by three graduate students, Martha Ackmann, Karen Dandurand, and Joanne Dobson. By 1996, when Sherry's name began to appear on the masthead, it had grown into a handsome perfect-bound quarterly journal published by the Pennsylvania State University Press. As Martha and Joanne withdrew from the editorship and Sherry joined Karen as editor, they made a wise division of labor. Karen became the bridge between the journal's founding era and a period of exciting growth, in which became the center of a group of scholars who gathered in conferences and professional associations, and who produced a remarkable body of scholarship that made visible the cultural productions crafted by the hidden hands of earlier American women writers. Between 1996 and 2004, Sherry expanded the reach of Legacy, brought it an increased scholarly legitimacy, and provided a point around which those interested in recovery work, archival research, literary analysis, and cultural studies could find common ground. Even readers unfamiliar with Sherry will see her fingerprints in the redesigned format, design, and content of shortly after she became editor. These were not merely cosmetic touches but symptoms of the journal's emerging identity as a source of pathbreaking scholarship that honored the literary-historical, biographical, and bibliographic work from which it stemmed. had formerly published a maximum of three scholarly essays; it now contained five or six. It revitalized features that earlier editors had envisioned and added others that are now familiar. For example, Conversations, inaugurated by Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman, Elizabeth Engelhardt, Frances Smith Foster, and Laura Micham, produced an Archive Survival Guide that is still a foundational reading for graduate training. (1) Legacy Reprints introduced readers to brief primary texts, once published but long forgotten. From the Archives printed unpublished primary sources enhanced by scholarly commentary linking them to the worlds and work of women writers. Such changes are, as I've suggested, traces indicating that activity has taken place but only barely suggesting the amount of labor that brought them about. Since so much of scholarly editing is occluded work, let me, for a moment, play Pudd'nhead Wilson and explicate what these fingerprints imply about the editor's hidden hand. The journal's physical transformation signaled a change largely invisible to readers. Early in Sherry's tenure, changed publishers from the Pennsylvania State University Press to the University of Nebraska Press. Terminating the relationship with one press while arranging for another to sponsor a journal is a process tantamount to selling a home or changing academic jobs. Timing is crucial. Tact and skill in business negotiations with both the former and future affiliates is absolutely necessary. It entails writing articulate proposals supported by hard numbers; it involves skills of gentle persuasion and rhetorical deftness, both qualities Sherry has in abundance. She represented the journal's interests to the University of Nebraska Press, the journal's home since she signed the contract in 1999. …