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In a black roan quarto notebook kept throughout the 1870s -arguably the most significant decade of her career -George Eliot (1963: 449) jotted down an errant thought: "Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others." Here Eliot incidentally captured a potential paradox of note-taking itself, for the act of chronicling perceptions of the world bears both explicitly personal and suggestively social dimensions. Though private notebooks most obviously facilitate thinking without scrutiny, the act of inscription enables transmission to interested audiences -as this famed author well knew at this late stage in her life. Moreover, if note-keeping offers a tantalizing prospect of "walk[ing] in clearness [by] ourselves," it is also shaped by an inescapable "common mist": the social medium of language through which all forms of self-expression unfold.Simon Reader richly explores such tensions and apparent antinomies in Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style, a study of the notebooks of major Victorian authors. As Reader reveals, writers' notes -conventionally "not read as much as they are used" -can bear their own aesthetic value, and so should be read as "ends in themselves" rather than mined only for their relevance to completed works of art (3). Coining a term -notework -designed to situate writers' notebooks alongside their more polished artwork, Reader aims to "pluralize what we count as form and style" (2) by reframing an apparent absence of intention as the choice to embrace a particular medium and style: "By elucidating

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