Claire Lamont is General Editor for the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels. She has published widely on Jane Austen and Romantic literature, and has edited Scott's The Heart of Midlothian and Austen's Sense and Sensibility for Oxford World's Classics. Kathryn Sutherland is the editor of Scott's Redgauntlet, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and Austen-Leigh's Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections for Oxford World's Classics. She has created a digitial edition of Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts (2010), the print edition of which is due to be published by OUP in 2014. She is the author of Jane Austen's Textual Lives: from Aeschylus to Bollywood (OUP, 2005).
There are all sorts of good reasons to read Waverley; it's important, influential, deals with issues of identity and political loyalty which are most certainly still relevant, is interesting to read against the current political situation in Scotland too, but much more than that its also enjoyable. Shiny New Books, Hayley Anderton