The Author''s Effects: On the Writer''s House Museum is the first book to describe how the writer''s house museum came into being as a widespread cultural phenomenon across Britain, Europe, and North America. Exploring the ways that authorship has been mythologised through the conventions of the writer''s house museum, The Author''s Effects anatomises the how and why of the emergence, establishment, and endurance of popular notions of authorship in relation to creativity.It traces how and why the writer''s bodily remains, possessions, and spaces came to be treasured in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as a prelude to the appearance of formal writer''s house museums.It ransacks more than 100 museums and archives to tell the stories of celebrated and paradigmatic relics—Burns'' skull, Keats'' hair, Petrarch''s cat, Poe''s raven, Brontë''s bonnet, Dickinson''s dress, Shakespeare''s chair, Austen''s desk, Woolf''s spectacles, Hawthorne''s window, Freud''s mirror, Johnson''s co