Paper Art and Craft: Victorian Writers and Their Materials

Research and writing of a book on 19th-century poets, novelists, and artist who used the materials of writing and everyday life as inspiration for their work.This project considers 19th-century British authors who used the materials of writing for inspiration and experimentation: Charlotte Brontë composing poems in the margins of printed books, George Eliot jotting ideas on her blotter, E.B. Browning sewing paper to paper to edit her poems, or Jane Austen using straight pins to 'cut and paste.' Albums, journals, and notebooks play central roles, as embodied, haptic spaces where writers created text-and-collage gifts for friends, stored material memories, or collected appropriated words. Paper crafts and needlework served as text composition outside the bounds of ink and pen, and writing's platforms—desk, slate, wall—mattered. This expanded view of what creativity with textual things meant was common, but the writers discussed here were excessive in their undoing, encrypting, and reusing. Their attention to seemingly insignificant details has been overlooked, primarily because such details have been aligned with the feminine and domestic.