In the first sentences of her new, highly-acclaimed novel The Goldfinch (coming out this month) Donna Tartt uses the uncommon inwrought to conjure a mood of creepy fairy tale isolation.
While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years. I'd been shut up in my hotel for more than a week, afraid to telephone anybody or go out; and my heart scrambled and floundered at even the most innocent noises: elevator bell, rattle of the minibar cart, even church clocks tolling the hour, de Westertoren, Krijtberg, a dark edge to the clangor, an inwrought fairy-tale sense of doom.
Just as a wright is an old fashioned way of referring to someone who makes or builds something, as a wheelwright or a playwright might do, wrought is an old fashioned way of saying "worked" or "made." Inwrought then refers to the manner in which something is made, specifically where decorative elements are "worked into" the materials in question.
It's not a word you hear often — the usage tracker on our definition page, though replete with literary references, shows nothing for inwrought from news, tech, sports, business, or arts and culture sources. So it is a bold and original statement Tartt makes by putting inwrought on page one of her novel. And yet perfectly appropriate to the mood of her character, whose freewheeling imagination mixes her current sense of danger and isolation with old stories of dangers and tests, carried into her memory via the chiming of centuries-old clocktower bells.
