Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd / Jane Austen: Mansfield Park. Ed. John Wiltshire / Jane Austen: Emma. Ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan

• Michael Wheeler

To begin at the beginning: I should declare an interest. During my co-Directorship of Chawton House Library, which is dedicated to the study of early women’s writing, I was appointed joint general editor of this edition. Professor Janet Todd and I decided upon the editorial policy and chose the editors of individual volumes, in close collaboration with Linda Bree and Andrew Brown of Cambridge University Press and in consultation with a distinguished editorial board, which includes Marilyn Butler, Alistair Duckworth, Isobel Grundy, Claudia Johnson, Jerome McGann, Deirdre Le Faye and Linda Bree. We then commissioned the editors and brought them together for a conference at Cambridge. When I left Chawton, however, Professor Todd kindly acknowledged that I should be free to pursue my own quite different programme of research, which I did. Now, only four years on, the first three volumes of the series are before us, and what follows is an attempt to be objective in evaluating them.

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