Domestic Extracts

Abstract:This article reads Romantic literature through the medium of the commonplace book. It asks how Romantic readers doubly articulated place in this genre, within both the volume and the social world around it. I trace what happens to conceptions of women’s writing and authorship when we reconceptualize reading and writing as blended, inseparable activities that do not terminate in publication but move iteratively through cycles of reading and writing, print and manuscript. The focus is on one of a pair of nineteenth-century commonplace books written by Louisa Wildman and her husband, owners and inhabitants of Byron's former home, Newstead Abbey.