The role of the editor in crafting literary fiction is as fascinating as it is secretive. Some interventions we know about; Charles Monteith of Faber and Faber, for example, took on a debut novel his reader dismissed as an‘‘absurd and uninteresting fantasy… Rubbish and dull. Pointless” and helped transform it into Lord of the Flies. Raymond Carver, whose famously clipped prose turned out to be largely the creation of a severe editor, is an even more famous example. For every Iris Murdoch who wouldn’t change a comma, there are likely to be a hundred novelists who have gratefully accepted suggestions from their editor – or increasingly these days, their agent.It’s against this backdrop that we come to Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman. It is not