“Hor nam is Frances”: A book collector writing her life

The notes Frances Wolfreston left in her almanacs constitute emergent life-writing: they are clearly specific, personal, and written as a record. Their relationship to Wolfreston’s other book inscriptions might bring the latter, too, into the remit of life writing. In the distinct practices of her almanac notes and her book inscriptions, Wolfreston makes use of paratext with a deliberation that suggests that printedness itself may spur readers to write some version of a self, hacking mise-en-page to generate a structure for a life.