Editing Women

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Western Ontario.

Over the past decade, there has been increased interest (particularly
among feminist scholars) in the recovery of lost and forgotten literary
texts by women. The Thirty-First Conference on Editorial Problems, which
took place at the University of Toronto in 1995, focused on the specific
challenges faced by women when editing texts by women. The conference
papers that have been collected in this volume cover a broad spectrum of
genres and periods, ranging from 20th-century Canadian poetry to
medieval English mystic writings, yet they reflect the common concerns
and issues that feminist editors encounter.

In her introduction to the essays, Ann Hutchison refers to some of the
book’s recurring themes: the issue of how authority is accorded to any
one version of a text, challenges to the notion of a “definitive” or
“complete” text, and the role of gender both in the act of literary
production and in the power relations inherent in the act of editing.
Although many issues of editorial methodology can be applied to male
writers as well as female ones, all the contributors offer intriguing
insights into the relationship between gender and the act of editing;
many report feelings of connectedness with the women whose works they
are editing, and several compare their methods with those of male
editors.

Each of the papers provides a fascinating glimpse into the various
challenges presented to an editor by each author, period, and genre, and
the editors themselves present a revealing examination of the
complexities involved in attempting to produce a writer’s “true
voice.” Margaret Anne Doody’s concluding essay neatly sums up many
of the issues and concerns raised in the papers, referring to the
editor’s dilemma of authority and control as “a fine line of
trespass.” Joan Coldwell, in her essay on Canadian poet and editor
Anne Wilkinson, notes that the unique issues faced by women editors when
working with texts written by women have not, for the most part, been
addressed in print; fortunately, in Editing Women they have.