Abstract
Abstract Chapter 5 moves even further away from more traditional ideas about “authorship” to focus on the notion of “writing” as a more experimental act. Paper and text-related materials had talismanic, decorative, and artistic purposes. Needlework skills helped authors revise manuscripts or craft blank books to be filled with composition. Writing needn’t include ink, as Victorian women were adept at exploiting. Embroidery on paper, pinpricks through paper, cut-out silhouettes, and needle-books inscribed or shaped like books locate the work of women’s hands in a continuum of craft. Samplers provided a mode of composition so labor intensive that the makers sometimes invested them with magical significance. The Victorian novelist and botanist Anna Atkins made albums of seaweed, ferns, flowers, and lace using cyanotype technology, an early form of camera-less photography that marked the shadow of the object directly on the page. Atkins also made these “photograms” of her handwriting, turning text and autograph into ghostly absence.
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