| Summary: | Editors take on authorial power when their role moves beyond the recovery and explication of a text to its revision for a specific audience. This article examines the editorial recreation of two types of domestic narrative: national literary history, constructed by philologists; and family records, constructed by patriarchs. Both seek to create a particular image of community and belonging, and so are significant for the popular perception of a coherent, shared culture in the context of nineteenth-century German nationalism. Via a metaphorical reading of the family in Theodor Storm’s novella Carsten Curator, I reveal how the editors of such histories become ‘speculative authors’: they attempt to construct a narrative of continuity for the future by rewriting a domestic past. Their official records, however, exclude competing narratives that have the potential to undermine these projects. Editorial omission becomes a flawed attempt to achieve authorial control.
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