Philip Hensher

It feels somehow improper to witness an author groping for the right words

It even borders on the painful in the case of W.B. Yeats doggedly reworking the first lines of ‘All Soul’s Night’, or Samuel Beckett perfecting the opening of Murphy

A version of the opening of a key chapter of Frankenstein: ‘It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man completed with an anxiety that almost amounted to agony...’ Mary Shelley began working on the novel when she was only 18, and the manuscripts show several traces of the suggestions made by Percy Bysshe Shelley. [© Bodleian Library Publishing, Univeristy of Oxford, 2024]
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  • Write, Cut, Rewrite: The Cutting Room Floor of Modern Literature

    Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon

    Bodleian Library Publishing, pp. 200, £40

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