Jennie Batchelor - Jane Austen Embroidery: Authentic Embroidery Projects for Modern Stitchers

Jane Austen
Embroidery

To my grandmother, Betty Smith,
who taught me to sew and much more besides
Jennie Batchelor

To my husband, Chris Larkin,
the Wind beneath my wings.
Alison Larkin

Jane Austen
Embroidery

Authentic embroidery projects
for modern stitchers

Jennie Batchelor
with projects by Alison Larkin

Needlework... if properly attended, will very happily serve to fill up a ladys time, without bringing any discredit to her understanding

(Ladys Magazine, 1775)

W e all know that Jane Austen was an accomplished novelist. Less well known is that she was also a talented stitcher, as at home holding a needle in her hand as she was wielding a pen. In an 1870 biography of his aunt, James Edward Austen-Leigh described her as successful with everything that she attempted with her fingers, whether she was plotting her novels, playing games with her nephews and nieces, or working at her needle. She was happier in her domestic employments than in her professional ones, according to her biographer. The story he shares of the secretive Jane Austen refusing to allow a creaking door at Chawton cottage to be fixed so that she could hide her scribbling from potential intruders is a familiar one. This image of the novelist rapidly concealing papers and pen presents quite a contrast to the others he tells about his aunt happily making clothes, or embroidering and crafting gifts for the poor surrounded by her family and favourite female companions. These, we are told, were some of the merriest times of her life.

For Jane Austen, needlework was a sociable activity and a pleasurable one. Along with other family members, she regularly performed what was called plain-work (the making of household linen and undergarments). Whats more, she took pride in the activity. Describing a particularly busy period making shirts for her brother, Edward, Jane could not resist telling her sister, Cassandra, she was the neatest worker of the party.

Such accomplishments were widely expected of middle-class women in the Georgian period, not only in England but elsewhere in Britain and its colonies, as well as America and Europe. It is no surprise the parlour of Emmas Mrs Goddards is hung around with fancy-work. (Little does Henry know that Catherine has more success wielding a cricket bat than a needle.)

Embroidery was a way of filling up womens leisure time and proving that they were fit to run a domestic household. But for some of Jane Austens contemporaries this work was a form of drudgery. Early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft spoke for many when she claimed in her 1792 political essay, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that women were taught decorative arts such as

Jane Austen, however, did not find needlework at odds with her intellectual life as an author. Her novels sometimes poked fun at needlewomen. The superfluousness of Mansfield Parks Lady Bertram is summed up nicely, for instance, in the description of her as a woman who spent her days in sitting nicely dressed on a sofa, doing some long piece of needlework, of little use and no beauty. But these bad needlewomen reflect well on the accomplished needlewomen they are contrasted with. Fanny Price and Elizabeth Bennet are much more skilled at their work, and much more deserving heroines than Lady Bertram and Lady Catherine could ever hope to be as a consequence. And while the novels poke fun at fashion victims such as Northanger Abbeys vacuous, if goodhearted, Mrs Allen, they present a world where the sartorial elegance of an Eleanor Tilney is a marker of sense and where understanding muslins, as her brother Henry does, is a sign of worldliness.

Like these characters, Jane Austens surviving letters, and at least one possible portrait of her, show she had a keen interest in fabrics, fashion and style, albeit one constrained by her limited budget as an unmarried woman living on the fringes of gentility. Her correspondence frequently mentions the prices of fabrics, garments and trimmings bought and prized as great bargains.

Despite her careful economy and skill in adapting and accessorizing clothes, it would be wrong to think of Jane Austen as a model domestic woman, even if many of her early biographers portrayed her as such. Her letters and novels show that she could be scathing about marriage and the bearing and raising of children. She was certainly annoyed by having to entertain impolite guests or to deal with the incessant dripping of rain in the store closet while trying to write. But needlework seems to have been an exception to these forms of daily domestic irritation. A constant in her life, sewing is presented throughout her letters as a sociable activity undertook with pride and pleasure.

Needlework, fashion and Ladys Magazine

We cant be quite certain of where and how Jane acquired her sewing skills. As a girl, and like all middle-class girls of that time, she would have been taught to sew at home from as young as six or seven, perhaps even before she could write. Needlework would also have been part of her formal education at school in Reading. But where did she acquire her knowledge of fashion and style? And where might the patterns she used for those caps have come from?

A likely source is a publication we know that Jane Austen read, not least because she borrowed plots and the names of characters including Colonel Brandon and Mr Willoughby from it. The Ladys Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex ran for 13 issues a year from August 1770 until 1832. It was hugely popular, outliving many rivals, and selling up to 15,000 copies at the height of its appeal. (To put that in context, the magazines circulation was 20 times the size of Janes first novel, Sense and Sensibility, which was published in a standard print run of 750 copies in 1811.) This figure seems a conservative estimate.

Despite the complex logistics involved, the magazine was circulated overseas to Europe and to America through bookseller networks and the efforts of individuals. George Washington, for instance, had copies of the magazine shipped over to Mount Vernon, in Virginia, for his stepdaughter Patsy, in a trunk that also contained thread, pins, laces and silk stockings. Just as a single copy of a magazine can have multiple readers today, from the initial purchaser to the friends we pass them on to, or the people who pick them up at the dentists or hairdressers, issues of the