Who edits those classic novels you study in college and graduate classes?

My husband does!

Or at least some of the best of them. 🙂

We just learned that both volumes of his long-term, many-years-in-the-making project of editing Samuel Richardson’s Pamela are now listed on the Cambridge University Press website:

• Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded
• Pamela in Her Exalted Condition

“Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded is perhaps the most influential novel published in Britain in the eighteenth century. On its first publication in 1740, it became an immediate bestseller. Its epistolary structure, tight plotting and didactic message were praised, imitated, but also criticised and satirised. This new critical edition of Samuel Richardson’s first novel features an authoritative text based on the first edition, general and textual introductions, extensive explanatory notes and textual apparatus. Appendices provide bibliographical descriptions of all lifetime editions as well as the editions of 1801 and 1810, Richardson’s introduction to the second edition (fully annotated), and the illustrations and Richardson’s index from the octavo edition. The publication of this volume heralds the first full scholarly edition of Richardson’s complete works, a long-awaited event in eighteenth-century studies.” Read More

I’m so proud of the work he does, work that is painstaking and often invisible to others, yet benefits teachers and students and readers for not just years, but decades to come. His previous editions have included Norton editions of Gulliver’s Travels and Moll Flanders.

Because Al doesn’t have a blog of his own, I’m gladly filling in as publicist. 😀