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particularly Romantic poets, composing their works and revising them in isolation, Havens addresses not only edits to unpublished novel manuscripts, but also post-publication revisions to depict authorship as collective and dependent upon a writer's network—from family and friends, to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 solely from manuscript to print,” but a process of returning, rethinking, repurposing, removing, and reconfiguring that results from dialogue (4). Thus, authorship is not conceived of as solitary, but hybrid. It is a “social nexus” (as Jerome J. McGann calls it), and revision the sign of heteroglossia (12). Havens makes a strong case for the “act of revision,” describing “compositional parallels between the early novel and the more established genres of drama and non-fictional prose” (9).Havens organizes the book by canonical authors Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and Maria Edgeworth—with a final chapter on Laurence Sterne, Matthew Lewis, and William Godwin. The strengths of this organization are many: the chapters develop an interesting textual history for each author's works; each chapter can stand on its own as a valuable study of the aforementioned writers and the practices of revision, and across chapters, we can find a larger narrative that places these authors in an interconnected network: they are both writers and readers of each other's works.The opening chapter on Richardson establishes his “networked authorship,” how he accepted and rejected feedback on his writings, and how that feedback affected first and subsequent editions of his novels, as well as a Pamela sequel (20). Havens reveals how Richardson responded to not only suggestions from Pamela's readers, but also to other writers, noting, for instance, how Richardson's Pamela sequel, Pamela in Her Exalted Condition, was written to trump fan fiction, such as John Kelly's Pamela's Conduct in High Life. In her section on Clarissa, Havens explains how Richardson added “sexually implicit material” to later editions to clarify how he wanted Lovelace to be seen as a villain (17). In part, Havens claims, Richardson's revisions to Clarissa are a response to readers’ comments on and writers’ continuation of Pamela's story. The tale of how the Clarissa revisions unfold across the first three editions reveals that Richardson was keen on introducing plot points that would make Lovelace's seductive and violent nature more apparent and, supposedly, make the character less likable. She also explains that Richardson requested contributions to the end of Sir Charles Grandison to bring his circle of readers into collaborative authorship and to provide alternate endings to the novel. He did the same with Clarissa, but rejected the proposed endings, which leads Havens to conclude that with Grandison Richardson “evinces a fully privatized revision process and demonstrates the sustained impact of [his] correspondents who influenced him at all stages of his writing process from inception to composition to revision.” Havens further states that Richardson's “solicitation of their views [of Grandison] cemented his authorial autonomy,” which can be read as paradoxical, considering that he requested their feedback, in a kind of crowdsourcing move, but then rejected their ideas in favor of his own (45).The Burney chapter focuses on “textual recovery” and Burney's “obliterations and unending revisions” to her novels (55). Here, Havens analyzes a series of textual emendations consisting of pages cut, significant passages crossed out, and linguistic and stylistic changes in the author's four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. Havens's comparison of editions per novel, and across the novels, posits that textual recovery leads to new interpretations of plot, characters, and Burney's attitudes toward genre. As in her chapter on Richardson, Havens asks us to see Burney as the “editor of her own fictions” and to notice the impact of Burney's relationship with her readers and reviewers on her growing authorial autonomy. Havens starts with Evelina, which “was drafted in secret almost entirely without the interference of her family and friends,” because the author was developing an innovative characterization of her heroine and other characters (56). Havens reads this secrecy as a product of Burney's gender. Burney had to weigh what was appropriate for female propriety—her characters’ as well as her own. As Havens situates Burney in a private/public, manuscript/published text paradigm, we can see the way that an author's network affects her composition process and revisions. Feedback from friends, family, and critics influenced the author's recycling of material from her earlier works, such as in her juvenilia, for example, Evelina (which Havens calls “internal revision”), and even in her writing style (which we might call “external revision”). Like Richardson's alterations to Lovelace, Burney's changes from manuscript to published text reveal quite a different version of Evelina: the manuscript Evelina “contains an angrier, nastier version,” framed by a “darker satirical lens” (59). The published Evelina, then, appears a “more sympathetic and modest character with few faults beyond her naïveté and unreliability as a correspondent” (62). In examining Cecilia, Havens comments on the similarities between the novel and Burney's play, The Witlings, and explains how Burney's “two ‘daddies’ ” (her father and Samuel Crisp) advised her to suppress the play because its sharp satire of Bluestockings (63). Unlike Evelina, on which Burney could not receive suggestions, since she was writing the book in secret, when she wrote Cecilia and the play, openly, Burney received feedback that, as Havens demonstrates, influenced her writing. The standout example from Cecilia is the deletion of a lengthy passage from the masquerade scene describing Mr. Monckton's “satanic rites” and including “Burney's imitation of Coptic language” (72–73). The chapter includes two images from the manuscript to serve as evidence for this claim and to show how the published Cecilia shortens this exchange to a single sentence (74–75).Havens makes a compelling argument for seeing how revisions reveal a darker side of Burney that we would not have access to without comparing her manuscript to the published novel. In analyzing Cecilia, Havens returns to gender: had Burney retained the satanic passage, she would have “violat[ed] female propriety” (76). Havens's discussion of Camilla points to both the role of critics in determining Burney's revisions, but also to Burney's plan for a third edition that would have included more gothic elements. Havens helpfully compares the first edition with subsequent editions and notes the percentage of text cut from this long novel. She concludes the chapter with exploring how The Wanderer's “proto-feminist heroine” Elinor “serves as a symbol of [Burney's] unwillingness to surrender authorial control and her increased generic experimentation during the final years of her life” (85). Like Richardson, then, Burney is eventually reluctant to “surrender her work” to those “authorial networks” (89). Elinor is a character Burney “refused to change in her revisions,” because Elinor “serves as a fitting metaphor for Burney and her battles with the critics” (88). Ultimately, studying Burney's revisions, or lack thereof, “has the potential to shape contemporary interpretations” of her novels and “authorial agency” (88).Havens's chapter on Austen expands concepts introduced in the previous chapter, one of them being how revision serves as a form of female empowerment. Like Burney, Austen, too, was influenced by a network of family, friends, and critics. Austen accepted suggestions and, as in Havens's study of Burney, we are asked to see how the author's gender relates to her authorial network. A notable difference between Burney and Austen emerges, however, in Havens's focus on revision as a form of empowerment for Austen—which Havens touches on with The Wanderer, but fully explores in examining Austen's “commentary on the condition of women” that appears in her revision and recycling of material. Even though Austen scholars have analyzed her manuscripts and revisions, thanks to their accessibility in digital and print versions, Havens offers new insights into the relationship between Austen's “recycling practices and emerging social conscience” (93).Havens turns to manuscripts, including juvenilia samples and “The Watsons,” to explain how Austen incorporated “traces” of her unpublished writings into novels, namely Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion (91). Havens's study of sensibility not only bridges a gap between “Love and Freindship” [sic] and Sense and Sensibility, for example, but also explores Austen's revisions across published editions of the novel. In turning to Mansfield Park, Havens brilliantly explores how Austen handles “misbehaving women” and recalls how Austen again recycled themes from her juvenilia—in this case, “The Three Sisters” (102). Havens also impresses upon us how reading the aforementioned story alongside Mansfield Park makes clear “Austen's refusal to take a heavy-handed stance” on some of the novel's female characters’ immorality and impropriety, including Maria's adultery (103). As in the section on Sense and Sensibility, Havens walks us through changes between editions of the published work.The section on The Watsons also offers an intriguing look at how Austen's pruning of passages in the incomplete novel point to her penchant for scenes of female empowerment, which, Havens argues, Austen develops in Persuasion. Like the juvenilia, scenes from The Watsons can be read as a palimpsest for published work as well as for “the proto-feminist agenda” that Austen, unlike Burney, “was able to voice” (116). At the close of the chapter, Havens's analysis of Persuasion encourages us to see such an agenda in terms of revision. While the canceled chapters of Persuasion are well known to Austen scholars, Havens asks us to reconsider how Austen's transformation of plot produces a pivotal scene in the novel—a moment where, in conversation with Harville, “Anne voices one of Austen's sharpest critiques on the plight of unmarried women” (117). Had Austen stuck with the canceled scene between Anne and Wentworth, the protagonist would have remained in a passive position in the conversation. The change, Havens argues, affects not only how we see Anne, but also how we understand Austen's “authorial confidence” (120). Austen's instinct to make this change is a sign of her empowerment.Edgeworth's network of family, friends, and reviewers, like Austen's, played a crucial role in the author's revisions, but Havens points out that Edgeworth's “openness to revision” far surpassed Austen's, Burney's, and Richardson's (124). Further, Havens illustrates the extent to which Edgeworth's family, in large part her father, affected not only how Edgeworth interpreted feedback, but also, even more, how she envisioned authorship as collaborative. Her father contributed much to her writing process, and after he died, her stepsisters and cousins took over his role, thus revealing how much Edgeworth relied on her network and how she was affected deeply by her interlocutors. Citing multiple letter exchanges between Edgeworth and her family and readers, Havens demonstrates that Edgeworth listened to the advice regarding removing sensitive subjects—even if it entailed shifting entire narrative voices—and she heeded the responses readers had to her plots, narrators, and depictions of “scientific and specialized knowledge,” as well as to her didacticism (126). In sections on Belinda, Patronage, Harrington, Helen, and the discarded novel Take for Granted, Havens guides us through the significant changes Edgeworth made between drafts and editions of her novels and across her published works. Some of these changes involve omitting a planned interracial marriage in Belinda and shifting away from a first-person an anti-Semitic narrator in Harrington; other evidence indicates that Edgeworth, like Austen, recycled some of her earlier work, including Patronage, Edgeworth's children's stories, and Professional Education, which she coauthored anonymously, publishing it under her father's name, because she feared readers would not take advice on “masculine professions from a female author” (131). Havens carefully presents evidence from Edgeworth's plans for her novels as well as correspondence with her authorial network to demonstrate that some of the changes she made were tied to her gender—thus extending the argument in her chapters on Burney and Austen.In the section on Harrington, Havens points out a fascinating instance of an author listening to a reader's criticism and trying to adjust. The example is Edgeworth's response to Rachel Mordecai's letter regarding the author's anti-Semitic portrayals in Moral Tales for Young People, which Edgeworth took to heart and attempted to address head-on in Harrington. However, this was easier said than done, as the novel's original plan and drafts of the text show Edgeworth grappling with a prejudiced narrator—which she eventually revised—and she struggled in her handling of Jewish characters. But she was not working through these ideas by herself; her half sister seems to have contributed to the writing of Harrington. Edgeworth's Helen can be seen as a revision an earlier work, but not by Edgeworth: she turned to George Crabbe's tale “The Confidant.” As with Harrington, Helen ventured in multiauthored territory as family made up an important part of her authorial network. Here, Havens shares a fascinating instance of a member of the network serving as scribe, for a draft of Helen (the only full draft of an Edgeworth novel known to exist) reveals that part of the text is not written in Edgeworth's hand. While scholars have debated whether this means her half sister, Lucy, wrote that piece, or merely transcribed it, Havens claims that the important point is that Edgeworth was writing with—even possibly dictating to—a collaborator. Like Edgeworth's previous novels, the draft also reveals that she was working on “daring characterizations” of women, and even on a “darker version of her story,” but decided to suppress those renderings (147–48). Havens concludes this section by analyzing Edgeworth's Helen deletions as symptoms of a woman writer conforming to “patriarchal norms” (149). The final section of the Edgeworth chapter culminates in pondering what the would-be novel Take for Granted might have looked like had the author and her network continued to pursue it. Her father wanted her to finish it, and she worked on it over the course of her career, but ultimately, she decided to burn the manuscript. Like Richardson, who initiated crowdsourcing as an authorial practice, Edgeworth realized that sometimes the products of those collaborations are best left unpublished.The last chapter discusses Sterne's, Lewis's, and Godwin's networked authorships and revision practices, as well as gestures beyond the eighteenth century to explore the role of revision today. Havens reminds us that, because Sterne published Tristram Shandy serially, he was able to receive feedback from readers and critics while he was writing the novel. She further connects Sterne's composition and revision strategies to Richardson's dialogue with his reviewers. In her examination of four editions of The Monk, Havens argues that Lewis's post-publication revisions were made to appease those who found his text obscene and blasphemous. While Lewis removed some “explicit sexual details” and problematic language regarding sexual violence and consent, he retained other forms of violence and “grotesque scenes” (163). He did not, according to Havens, engage in “an active dialogue between friends, readers, and reviewers” as Richardson and Sterne did; instead, his revisions amount to a “one-sided means of atonement,” and, like Edgeworth, “expunge[ment]” (165). In exploring Godwin's literary network and his revision of his novels, Havens makes a case, as she did with Burney, Austen, and Edgeworth, for connecting the writer's earlier work with the development of their later novels. In approaching Godwin, Havens focuses on how Caleb Williams was shaped by his network, his own Political Justice, and three of his sentimental novels. Havens's discussion of Godwin and sensibility also nicely hearkens back to her discussion of Austen.The concluding pages of the chapter affirm that “the process of revision” has “been devalued by literary scholars” (particularly of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors) because it has been associated with femininity and weakness. Not only that, but the collaborative nature of revision has been seen as debunking the glorification of “the individual authority of professional authorship” (175). Havens diligently undercuts these viewpoints, and, rightly so, she challenges the myth of authorship as solitary genius, and shows that collaboration is actually “an essential feature of authorship” (176). As Havens puts it, none of the “significant authorial choices happened in a vacuum” (177). In studying revision as a legitimate authorial practice contingent upon interlocution, Havens bridges the gap between eighteenth-century novel writing and the kinds of writing and revisions we engage in today.Havens's book is a must-read for people interested in authorial networks and revision, regardless of the period and authors they study, and exceptionally useful for those interested in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authorship, and manuscript and publication practices, as well as scholars of Richardson, Burney, Austen, Edgeworth, Sterne, Lewis, and Godwin. Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel ultimately not only provides excellent examples and amazing insight into “authorship from manuscript to print,” as the book's subtitle explains, but also asks its readers to understand authorship as a network built upon reading, writing, dialogue, and revision. After one reads Havens's book, it would be impossible not to do that.