To read closely Nathaniel Hawthorne's Marble Faun in light of its genesis is to discover a series of remarkable parallels between the author, who sometimes copied passages from his notebooks into his romance, and the character Hilda, who copies paintings. But the correlations do not end there: they extend to Sophia, Hawthorne's wife, who resembles Hilda and who carried on her own practice of selectively copying her husband's journals for publication after his death. No matter what caused him to copy in the first place, Hawthorne's manner of composing in part by copying served him as artistic and psychological motivation to develop a certain theme. In this case, Hawthorne's activity of self-borrowing while composing The Marble Faun finds reflection in its theme of copying, and the character Hilda reflects not only Sophia but Hawthorne himself. In The Marble Faun Hawthorne created a microcosm of his current obsession with the practice and implications of copying.