Thanks to the amazing work of Alicia Micha Renfroe, I am pleased to announce that a comparative text of “A Story of To-Day,” serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, and its book version, Margret Howth (1862), is now available on the “Rebecca Harding Davis: The Complete Works” website (rebeccahardingdaviscompleteworks.com/). This is the only edition of Margret Howth that is fully annotated, making it a more teachable version of the novel as well.

This comparative text reveals—for the first time—the extraordinary editing Davis did before publishing the book version of her Civil War-era novel about labor, capitalism, and mid-19th-century philosophies of reform. Nearly every paragraph was edited, revealing the philosophical and cultural issues that concerned Davis as she prepared the manuscript for book publication.

This text is also an important contribution to the broader field of book history and nineteenth-century women’s textual practices.

Again, many thanks to Micha Renfroe (editor of Davis’s A Law Unto Herself, [U of Nebraska P]), for her commitment to bringing this important work to fruition.