Edward Waverley, a young English soldier, is caught up in the Jacobite rising of 1745-6, the last civil war fought on British soil and the attempt to reinstate the Stuart monarchy. With Waverley Scott invented the modern historical novel and profoundly influenced the development of European and American fiction for a century at least.

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).