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This review develops Patrizia di Bello's model of the album as female collection outlined in her article ‘Mrs Birkbeck's Album: The hand-written and the Printed in Early Nineteenth-Century Feminine Culture'. The review explores the practice of Victorian women's album-making in the context of ideas about collecting and the nineteenth-century museum. It argues that such albums both appropriate and subvert aspects of museum practice. Mrs Birkbeck's album challenges the idea of a traditional, chronological display but it utilises the juxtapositional elements inherent in museum exhibition to great interpretive effect.