Evelyn Innes 1901 — Preface

London: T. Fisher Unwin, 8 July 1901, page 7, 516 words

PREFACE

After being engaged for two years on the history of Evelyn Innes, I found I had completed a great pile of MS., and one day it occurred to me to consider the length of this MS. To my surprise I found I had written about 150,000 words, and had only finished the first half of my story. I explained my difficulties to my publisher, suggesting that I should end the chapter I was then writing, on what musicians would call "a full close,” and that half the story should be published under the title of Evelyn Innes and half under the title of Sister Teresa. My publisher consented, frightened at the thought of a novel of a thousand pages — 300,000 words.

I was wrong to yield to the temptation, but the pile of MS. was already high, and I thought how much higher it would be in two more years. True it is that Tolstoi waited until he had finished War and Peace before he published it; he even withheld the central idea of the book — the idea which gives it unity — till the last volume. But though we may admire and envy self-restraint and self-confidence, it does not follow that we possess them. I confess that I was not in possession of them at that time, and I may be so unfortunate that no readers may have the patience to study the book in the sequence that I originally designed. But I will not anticipate such ill-luck. I will hope that it will be understood that this is really the second volume of a novel which is meant to be read under one name and within one cover, and which will perhaps be ultimately presented to the public under the single title of Evelyn Innes.

The penalty I am paying for the premature publication of Evelyn Innes did not end with the division of my story into two parts. After having written for a couple of years on the second part of my book, the first part struck me as singularly diffuse; it read to me more like a sketch for a book than a book, and I appreciated Mr. Unwin’s idea of a sixpenny edition more than ever, for it has allowed me to remould Evelyn Innes. The story of course has not been altered, but the text is almost entirely new. No one, perhaps, has rewritten a book so completely. I am aware that the alteration of a published text is deprecated in the Press, but it is difficult to understand why, for have not Shakespeare and Balzac and Goethe and Wagner and Fitzgerald rewritten their works? Among my contemporaries, Mr. George Meredith and Mr. W. B. Yeats have followed the example of their illustrious predecessors. And let the weary reviewer be indulgent for my weakness or my strength, whichever it may be. In either case I have lightened his labour, for the new version, notwithstanding many additions, is 90 pages shorter than the original.