Circa 1830, somewhere in England, a young woman threaded a needle with bright red silk. Bent over a white length of linen stretched taught in a frame, she pushed her needle through the wrong side of the cloth, stabbing upward and pulling through with her other hand. She had practiced her craft for long hours, so long that the movements were as automatic as hands on a keyboard, though not quite as fast. In this practiced fashion, stitch by stitch, she marked her story in ephemeral red.

It's impossible to know the exact circumstances of her decision to "put this down," but the tone of her work reveals an frantic agony. Elizabeth does not introduce herself (we only learn the writer's name through dialogue from her father), but rather begins with a self-affacing disclaimer: "As I cannot write, I put this down simply and freely as I might speak to a person to whose intimacy and tenderness I can fully entrust myself, and who I know will bear with all my weaknesses..." The line is confounding - clearly, she can write. She could mean she's not a particularly good wordsmith, or perhaps that her current circumstances (a lack of privacy? no pen and paper?) prevent her from putting pen to paper. Immediately, the work draws the reader into a secret, some sort of illicit transfer of information in an act of "intimacy" with the reader. Immediately, the writer asks for grace in her "weaknesses."

A lack of punctuation