SOURCE: Badaracco, Claire M. “Pitfalls and Rewards of the Solo Editor: Sophia Peabody Hawthorne.” Resources for American Literary Study 11, no. 1 (spring 1981): 91-100.

In the following essay, Badaracco places Hawthorne's editorship of her husband's journals in historical context and reflects on the process of editing Hawthorne's own Cuba Journal.

When I began to edit the Cuba Journal as a solo editorial project, I recall describing in blithe naivete my aspirations and goals. I told a distinguished colleague that because the collection which housed the document permitted neither microfilm nor typewriters, I was planning to transcribe in pencil the three-volume, one-thousand-page holograph during the day, type a transcript from the handwritten copy in the evenings, eventually proofread typescript against holograph, and perform the necessary tasks of annotation, apparatus, and introduction. My friend looked at me squarely enough—man to man, so to speak—and admitted sympathetically: “My dear, you will...