Our edition of Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk is based on the 1836 edition published by Howe & Bates in New York, and specifically on the copy of that edition held in the Jesuits in Fiction collection in Santa Clara University's Archives and Special Collections. That collection contains nearly 30 editions of the novel, including many from the nineteenth century. To the best of our knowledge, the Howe & Bates is the earliest edition of the novel, as even another 1836 edition, published by Maria Monk in Boston, contains new material, including a pull-out map of the convent.
Our collation of material from the beginning of four early editions of the novel suggests that appendixes and other materials were regularly added to subsequent editions, and minor changes in wording and punctuation crept in frequently. At the same time, the content and organization of the book remained surprisingly consistent.
Even the chapter misnumbering in the first Howe & Bates edition that left out chapter 14 does not seem to have been corrected until the London edition of the book, which likely appeared later that year. By the Davenport and DeWitt edition of 1855, published in New York, much of the added material that had been added as appendixes over the years by other editors and publishers had been incorporated into the main text of the narrative, where they were given continuous chapter numbers. However, the originally missing chapter 14 was also missing from this version. Such textual details offer us critical, if inconclusive, information about which earlier editions publishers used as the source for later editions.
Our edition presents a historical versioning edition: faithful transcriptions of each page of the 1836 Howe & Bates edition appear alongside scanned images of the original. This format allows readers to view a digital facsimile of the original book--from cover to cover--while reading a transcription that includes explanatory annotations.
We are grateful for the support of Nadia Nasr, Director of Archives and Special Collections at Santa Clara University, who provided us with access to the many editions of the Monk narrative as well as other materials and research support during the process of creating this digital edition. Nadia also provided us with an overview of book history and supported us during the process of collating some of the earlier editions of the novel. Tom Farrell, Digital Initiatives librarian, created scans of the earliest editions for us and provided the OCR'd versions of the first edition from which we built our transcription. Leanna Goodwater, Humanities Librarian, provided us with research support.
