Literary Marginalia: Questions, Scribbles, and the Secret Life of Books

Scrawled notes, hastily jotted asides, and dense annotations in the margins—the messy residue of thought and reaction—have always been part of how books live in the world. Marginalia is a dialogue: between a reader and a text, between generations of readers, or even between an author and their own unfinished ideas.

The notion of marginalia as literary art is older than it might seem. In medieval manuscripts, illuminated glosses and commentaries often crowded the page more than the text itself. A monk might copy Augustine’s sermons in the center of the page while three sides of the parchment filled with centuries of commentary from other hands. Each reader layered their own interpretations and questions into the work. The result was a living, collaborative text, inseparable from its commentary.

In the Romantic era, marginalia took on a more personal and idiosyncratic character. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in particular, was famous for it. His notes in the margins of Milton, Shakespeare, and his own drafts are so rich and elaborate that they’ve been published in collected volumes. Reading Coleridge’s marginalia is like sitting beside him as he talks back to the books in his hands—digressive, brilliant, contradictory, alive. For scholars and writers alike, these notes blur the boundary between reading and writing, making us wonder whether the “real” text is in the poem itself or in Coleridge’s restless reactions.

Later, Edgar Allan Poe offered his own spin in his 1844 essay “Marginalia,” where he celebrated the practice of writing stray thoughts in books and argued that such fragments, though often overlooked, could be flashes of a writer’s best ideas. Poe called them “a collection of memoranda,” raw sparks that revealed the hidden energy of thought. This way of thinking about annotation anticipates the idea that literature is not always a finished product but a process—a chain of inspirations, second-guessings, and sudden bursts of insight.

Moving into the twentieth century, marginalia sometimes became a form of rebellion. Vladimir Nabokov, a meticulous reader and annotator, covered the books he read with elaborate notes and colored index cards, often transforming them into blueprints for his own novels. David Foster Wallace famously wrote extensive annotations in the books he read, layering them with a critical, argumentative, sometimes sarcastic voice. Reading Wallace’s marginalia reveals his intellectual process in motion—skeptical, insatiable, irreverent.

Even when they are not written by famous hands, marginal notes often have the strange quality of literature. A passionate underlining, a half-legible scrawl, an indignant “wrong!” scribbled beside a passage—these are intimate traces of another mind in motion. To stumble upon such notes in a used book is to feel unexpectedly addressed by a stranger, as though the text has become a three-way conversation: author, reader, and you. The work of literature expands outward, enriched by these layered responses.

For contemporary writers, marginalia is a reminder that writing always begins with reading, and that reading can be active, resistant, and creative. A young poet scribbling questions in the margin of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, or a novelist mapping thematic connections in the margin of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, is participating in the life of a book. The line between reader and writer becomes porous, and the margin becomes a testing ground for voice, style, and interpretation.

An online writing mentor encourages writers to treat their own marginalia as raw material—early drafts of essays, poems, or stories that might later take shape. Together in manuscript consultation, mentor and writer can revisit these annotations, asking what they reveal about the writer’s instincts, questions, and obsessions. Where a writer might see only messy notes, a mentor can point out recurring themes, stylistic quirks, or flashes of insight worth developing.

Mentors can introduce writers to the tradition of marginalia, offering examples that demonstrate how great thinkers used it as a literary form. They might suggest exercises such as writing deliberately expansive marginalia on a chosen text, or turning one’s annotations into a standalone creative piece. In a digital age where many readers highlight and comment within e-books or shared documents, marginalia has expanded into new forms—collaborative Google Docs filled with inline comments, or online reading groups that treat annotation as dialogue. An online mentor can guide writers in harnessing these tools, helping them transform casual responses into substantive creative work.

Every note in the margin is a declaration: I am here, I am thinking, I am entering into the text. For writers, this declaration can become the seed of new work, a moment of connection that sparks further exploration. And for those working alongside a mentor, marginalia can be a bridge between the solitary act of reading and the collaborative act of writing—a conversation across the page, and across time.