In ‘Electronic Scholarly Editions,’ Ken Price highlights an interesting editorial choice from Wright American Fiction, a digital expansion on Lyle Wright’s 1975 American Fiction 1851–1875: A Contribution Toward a Bibliography. Both Wright himself and the editors of the digital project include Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as part of of their overview of fictional works, but we now know what Wright presumably didn’t: that Jacobs’ work is narrative nonfiction. Price claims that its inclusion here means that Wright American Fiction is “a major contribution to scholarship without being a scholarly edition per se,” as a more “scholarly” choice would be to “take a stand”—presumably by disqualifying the work from the expanded bibliography.

It seems to me, though, that the question is not what qualifies as “scholarly” editing, but what the purpose of the project is, and—drawing on Abbott & Williams—what kind of editing they’re engaging in. The choice to keep Jacobs’ work is a documentary choice: it appears in the original, so it appears in the expanded and digitized version, and also one that plays into a kind of meta-historical-bibliography work. Wright’s inclusion of Jacobs’ work tells us that at the time he was writing it was believed to be fiction, and that it was originally published as such; we could then infer that those reading it when it was new also read it as such. If the goal behind Wright American Fiction is to accurately capture what Wright considered to be the important fictional works published between 1851-1875, then can it be considered less “scholarly” to include an incorrect entry? 

An editing decision based in textual criticism, then, and one allowed by the more flexible boundaries of online publication, would be to include the citation and full text, but annotated to include the expertise that the editors possess: that the text was long believed to be a fictional account written by white abolitionist Lydia Marie Child, but was in fact a nonfictional account of Jacobs’ own life. This would serve a third purpose other than either documentary—including the work without comment—or “correcting” Wright by excising it, highlighting issues of race and recognition, as well as potentially giving citation and credit to the scholar who discovered the real authorship of the work (Jean Fagan Yellin).