Sew What?

Authors Who Stitched, Part 1: Jane Austen!

June 25, 2020 Isabella Rosner Season 1 Episode 7
Sew What?
Authors Who Stitched, Part 1: Jane Austen!
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, Isabella discusses Jane Austen's needlework. She focuses on a sampler supposedly made by Jane Austen, as well as a quilt Jane made with her mother and sister.

Whatsup stitches!!!! We are back at it, thinking and dreaming and talking about historic needlework once again! Today we’re focusing on famous authors who stitched. Did you know that Jane Austen really loved to embroidery? And that her favourite stitch was satin stitch? Because I didn’t know that until a few years ago. And did you know that the samplers the Bronte sisters stitched as tiny little baby children still survive? And that they worked on a quilt together? There is so much to know!! So much info to share with you all! I’m so jazzed! This will be a two part episode – this week’s episode will be about Jane Austen’s needlework, focusing on a sampler and a quilt. Next week’s episode will be Bronte-oriented, looking at their samplers and a quilt they all made together.

I wrote about the needlework of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters for my undergrad dissertation, so I’m happy to be getting back to like my old stomping ground situation thing. Lil bebe me (not really, it was only four years ago, but still) went to Jane Austen’s house in Chawton, Hampshire and the Bronte Parsonage in Howarth, Yorkshire to see the Austen and Bronte textiles in person. Those trips were really helpful for my dissertation, but more importantly, I left Chawton with a bookmark of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy and Howarth with a Bronte Parsonage tea towel. So that was really important. Shout out to museum gift shops. They are TRULY my greatest love, my deepest joy. I am so grateful for them. 

Okay, but let’s get into it. I’m gonna start with Jane Austen’s stitching, obviously. But before I get into it, I should recommend a very relevant book I embarrassingly haven’t read yet but have heard very, very good things about. It’s called Jane Austen Embroidery: Authentic Embroidery Projects for Modern Stitchers by Jennie Batchelor and Alison Larkin. I think it’d be a really good, valuable resource for those of you who stitch. Anyhoo, onto Jane Austen’s stitchery.  

Let’s start with Jane Austen’s childhood needlework. So, there’s an English couple named Micheal and Elizabeth Feller who are avid collectors of needlework – they’ve donated a lot of their pieces to the Ashmolean Museum and they have a whole book about their collection. Their collection is full of really incredible objects. So they have in their collection a sampler made by one Jane Austen. Whether or not it was stitched by THE Jane Austen has been up for debate for a really, really long time. The sampler reads “Jane Austen 1797,” but some scholars believe it originally read 1787 and Jane removed some of the stitches in the 8 to conceal her real age. I’m obviously not the be all end all Jane Austen expert, but that feels like not that likely, given that Jane Austen was noted for her straightforwardness. When I wrote my dissertation three years ago, this is the footnote I wrote about the sampler: “In 1787, when the sampler was apparently made, there were ten Jane Austens of sampler-making age in England. Given the number of girls by this name and a lack of other identifying details on the sampler, it’s difficult to say with certainty that this sampler is the work of the novelist. The sampler was sold at auction for £2000 in 1996 and, according to the Phillips Auctioneers sale catalogue, the previous owner received this sampler as a present, folded inside a tobacco tin. It was purportedly inherited from Fred Nicholls, whose grandmother was related to Jane Austen. According to the Jane Austen Society Collected Reports, curators at the Victoria and Albert Museum “see no reason to doubt its authenticity.” If it is indeed a Jane Austen sampler, why was its price at auction not drastically more than other late 18th-century samplers? Why was it purchased by private collectors rather than a museum or other institution? Its low sale price and current ownership imply that sampler collectors and lovers of Jane Austen doubt the sampler’s authenticity, but its provenance points to its legitimacy.” End quote. 

So basically what undergrad me is saying is that this is likely not our Jane Austen’s sampler. And in a recent essay from February 2020, curator Alden O’Brien gives a really good, detailed analysis of why this is definitely not our beloved Jane’s sampler. I’m gonna give a quite detailed overview of O’Brien’s article, since it’s a really interesting example of how historic investigation work can be used to analyse needlework, which I obviously love very much. I got really excited about this article when it first came out and I’m still excited about it, since one of the reasons I really love studying needlework is that it can often be like a puzzle or investigation. Needlework, and samplers especially, provide a lot of clues that could point to a maker’s identity. O’Brien’s article is basically a foray into how those clues, plus the sampler’s provenance, made people believe this sampler was made by the famous author, but that it definitely wasn’t. Alden O’Brien’s article is called “Is this Jane Austen’s sampler?” and she published it on her own blog, “Curator’s Curio.” I’ll put a link to the article on the Sew What social media. Alden O’Brien has been a curator of costume and textiles at the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in Washington DC for nearly 30 years, so she definitely knows what she’s talking about.  

Okay, now let’s dig into this article and see why it’s clear Jane Austen did NOT make this sampler. As I said like one minute ago, the sampler signed “Jane Austen” has a stitched date of 1797. I raised the possibility that the year originally read 1787, but if it didn’t, Jane would’ve been 22 years old when she stitched her sampler, which is waaaaaaay too old to be making a sampler in the late 18th century. Was the 1797 date messed with?? There are samplers that have dates unpicked, but it’s pretty rare. As O’Brien rightly states and anyone who stitches will know well, when you unpick a stitch, the weave of the fabric gets distorted. Even when a fabric isn’t tightly woven, you’ll almost definitely be able to tell if there were once stitches because the weave of the ground fabric will be looser in those areas. The date on the Austen sampler doesn’t appear to have been unstitched or altered in any way.  

A lot of the debate about whether or not this is the author’s sampler revolves around the 9 in 1797, which is mega specific, I know. I’m talking about it a lot, you’re probably like “why is she doing this?” but it’s important and details in samplers are really important. There’s a close-up image of the date on the Sew What social media accounts so you can get up close and personal with this dating investigation with me because I am truly so in it. The 9 does look funky – it extends really far to the left, and it does look like it could plausibly have originally been an 8. But other contemporaneous samplers from England show that weirdly diagonal 9s, 9s that extend far to the left, were really popular. Another sampler from the Austen family even shows this. A sampler signed by Cassandra Elizabeth Austen, now on display at Chawton, shows that same funky 9, alongside a very up and down, quite narrow 8. It’s unclear if that sampler was made by Cassandra, Jane’s sister, or Cassandra’s, Jane’s niece, but either way, it points to that funky 9 being purposeful rather than the result of some unstitching. 

Okay, so that’s my whole thing on the date issue. We don’t need to get into it – you can if you want. Contact me and we can talk about it. I’m clearly too deep in that. That’s just to say the sampler likely WAS made in 1797, not 1787. The next point of discussion is the sampler’s supposed provenance. It was supposedly inherited from Fred Nicholls, whose grandmother was related to Jane Austen, according to my undergraduate dissertation footnotes and the sources that I took that from. An article from 1976 lists the sampler as being quote “owned by a Mrs Molly Proctor, who was given it by Mrs I. Thompson of Rochester, whose grandfather, Mr Frederick Nicholls of Whitstable, was a grandson of a cousin of Jane Austen” end quote. Alden O’Brien does an excellent job of delving deep into genealogy to figure out the sampler’s whole provenance. I’m not gonna give you all a detailed overview of that wonderful research – you can read it on the blog post if you’re interested. It’s just a lot of detail for this podcast right now. Anyhoo, I will summarize it briefly and say that basically the family provenance is aaaaaalmost right, it’s kind of close – Mr Frederick Nicholls was the grandson of a Jane Austen herself, not the grandson of Jane Austen’s cousin. And that Jane Austen is surely not the author Jane Austen, as Jane never had children. Also, the signature of the family provenance Jane Austen definitely does not match signatures of Austen herself, which we know well because everyone has a tattoo of it. Or maybe I’m just saying that because when I was like 14 years old I really wanted a Jane Austen tattoo.  

Okay so clearly this sampler is not the work of our gal Jane. But, thanks to Alden O’Brien, we get to uncover the story of another woman largely lost to history, which is very cool. We very much love to see it. The real sampler maker was a Jane Austen, obviously, who was born circa 1785 in Kent and who married Samuel Squire in 1803. Her sampler is really lovely – it has a border on all four sides of stylised strawberries. At the top is an alphabet, where each letter is stitched twice. In the centre of the sampler is a Biblical inscription from Daniel Fenning’s The Universal Spelling-Book. At the bottom are symmetrical flower, tree, and bird motifs. They frame the signature, which of course reads “Jane Austen 1797.” It’s a really charming example of stitching from the English middling class at the brink of the nineteenth century. Honestly, yay for Jane Austen Squire of Kent! We did not know much about her; she did not write six novels we love, but still she’s really important and her sampler is beautiful!  

Now, I know, I know, it’s a bit sad that this sampler isn’t our Jane’s, but there are a few surviving needleworked objects that definitely are hers. There’s a muslin shawl at the Chawton house that is believed to have been made by Jane. According to Penelope Byrde in a book called Jane Austen Fashion, the garment is quote “a white Indian muslin scarf or shawl embroidered in white cotton satin stitch. It is made in two pieces joined by a piece of lace insertion at the centre seam. The design consists of small crosses joined by white lines to form an all over trellis pattern” end quote.

Jane also made another needlework object I wanna spend a bit more time on. It’s the piecework quilt she made with her sister and mom. It doesn’t have batting or top stitching, so it’s technically a coverlet, but it’s more commonly referred to as a quilt. 

Jane, her sister, Cassandra, and their mother, also Cassandra, made the quilt sometime in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The only known date that indicates when the Austen gals were working on the quilt is the 31st of May, 1811. On that day, Jane wrote a letter to her sister. She wrote quote “Have you remembered to collect pieces for the patchwork? We are now at a standstill” end quote. Yas Cassandra! You get those patchwork pieces!! And also please just pretend my accent was an English one and not my stupid LA one when I was reading that Jane Austen letter. 

The Austen quilt is very hefty. It’s big. It’s six feet by eight feet, which would sit very comfortably on a modern king size bed, which is a cheeky five by six and a half feet, in case you wanted to know. The quilt’s pattern is made up entirely of diamonds. It consists of more than 200 large diamonds and roughly 2,500 small diamonds along all four edges. That is a heck of a lot of diamonds!! There are no other surviving 18th- or 19th-century quilts that I know of that match this ambitious diamond pattern. The large diamonds, which are bordered by white cotton fabric with black polka dots, are made of chintz in a variety of floral prints. These chintzes match those produced in England from the end of the 18th century into the beginning of the 19th, and the large, graphic prints in these diamonds indicate that they are bits of furniture fabric rather than dress fabric. Some of the diamonds are cut to best display the fabric’s pattern. The smaller diamonds that form the border of the quilt are made of brighter-coloured calicoes. The smaller scale patterns—including stripes, flower sprigs, and dots seen on most of these fabrics suggest that they come from dress fabric rather than furnishing fabric. The centre medallion, which is the biggest diamond of all, depicts a large wicker basket topped with flowers and birds. The basket is too big for even drapes or bed curtains, so it’s likely an example of a printed centrepiece produced specifically for quilt making.  

The Austen quilt consists of swatches from more than fifty fabrics, which is far too many different fabrics to be owned by a single family, especially a family made up largely of Navy men who lived far from home. Some of the fabrics would have come from old articles of clothing owned by the Austens, as well as scraps left over after stitching together items of clothing. Other fabric perhaps came from neighbours of the Austens who had extra fabric they didn’t need; this community fabric usage would explain Austen’s use of the word “collect” in her letter to her sister Cassandra. Some of the fabrics used to create the large diamonds were perhaps purchased specifically for the quilt, as it’s improbable that even multiple families would end up with such a variety of leftover furnishing fabric. However the Austen gals gathered their scraps, they obtained them from a community of women or from a haberdasher likely specifically catering to women. If they used scraps from their female neighbours, they were part of a larger community of women. And if they bought ready-made squares from a nearby clothier, they were also part of a larger community of women, as the clothier sold fabrics almost exclusively to women in the neighbourhood for use in upholstering chairs, creating bed or window curtains, or stitching clothing and quilts. Ladies!! Ladies helping ladies!! Ladies helping ladies stitch!! Ooh! Big fan of that. 

 Quilts were sometimes made to be solely decorative rather than for warming a bed. The Austen quilt is definitely an example of this. It’s clear the quilt is an entirely artistic rather than practical object because of its MASSIVE number of pieces, lack of batting, lack of wear, and very fine stitching. There are approximately ten stitches per inch, just FYI. A quilt with thousands of small pieces and small stitches, such as the Austen quilt, would have taken soooo many months or even years to make, far too long if a house is chilly and quilts are needed. That the quilt is a demonstration of skill rather than a means of keeping warm is reinforced by the fact that the Austen quilt doesn’t have any batting, being backed with just a sheet of cotton fabric sewn to the quilt’s front along each of the four edges. There are also no lines of stitching across the surface of the quilt to ensure that its back and front stay together after many winters of use. Even 200 years after Austen, her sister, and their mother sewed this quilt, the fabrics remain relatively vibrant, most likely a result of the quilt never having been washed. The fact that the quilt is exclusively an art object is really poignant to me—the Austen women sought to create something physically and emotionally larger and more lasting than themselves. By piecing together thousands of diamonds in a design of their own creation, Jane, Cassandra, and other Cassandra attempted to move beyond their role as practical stitchers, instead acting as artists on a grand scale.

And, a bit less poignantly but just as important, the Austen quilt design also shows that Jane and the Cassandras were pretty skilled mathematicians and designers. The math involved in designing a quilt made up of diamonds and borders would involve a lot of unfun angles, I’d think. And to do it all without a calculator and maybe not even a protractor! Who knows about the protractor. Did the average late 18th or early 19th-century woman have a protractor to figure out angles? I don’t know, I’m not sure, but I’d think they didn’t. That’s all to say that the Austen ladies were some dang good designers and maths people, creating a massive very symmetrical quilt. Go them!! I love them. 

And on another note, the Austens were also stitching their quilt just as Jane was entering the world of publishing. If this quilt was made in or around 1811, which it definitely was, its production coincided with the first publication of one of Austen’s novels, Sense and Sensibility. It was published anonymously; the phrase “By A Lady” appears on the front cover where the author’s name would normally be. It’s interesting to note the simultaneity of stereotypically feminine and masculine events. The gender binary is very fake but it is something that needs to be considered when thinking about 18th and 19th-century gender roles. Anyhoo, by producing the quilt with her sister and her mother, Jane strengthened her bonds within the Austen family and grounded herself in the traditional world of women’s work, while at the same time hiding behind the anonym “A Lady,” withholding her identity in the more masculine world of novel publishing. That’s obviously oversimplifying it, but that’s something too complicated to delve into on this podcast. 

Jane Austen treated needlework the way many of her contemporaries did, as necessary and time-consuming work. She even called it “work” in her letters. But she also really loved stitching, that much is clear. Her nephew, Edward Austen-Leigh, wrote in 1870 that his aunt’s quote “needlework both plain and ornamental was excellent, and she might almost have put a sewing machine to shame. She was considered especially great in satin stitch” end quote. This is obviously me romanticising a person who was, like all of us, flawed (see my episode about text and protest in which we learn that Jane Austen and her family supported Warren Hastings!!!! Yikes), but I do really love the idea of Jane thinking through her novel’s plots and characters as she stitched away. And I also am really fond of the idea of Jane and her mum and her sister sitting together and stitching, talking and gossiping and arguing and sitting in peaceful silence and enjoying each other’s company. And, above all, I really love that we can get to know Jane Austen not only through her words, but also through her stitches. What a good time.

Anyhoo, that’s my monologue on Jane Austen’s stitching. I’m not a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America for nothing. I’ll be continuing the theme of authors stitching next episode – it’ll be all about the good good Bronte sisters. As always, thank you for listening! And please like, subscribe, follow on social media, rate, review, tell your friends, do whatever, about “Sew What?” Your listening and support really, really means a lot to me. I am truly so genuinely very excited so many people like historic needlework! So thank you, thank you, thank you! Thank you very much.

Now go out and stitch some stories! And go read some Jane Austen! Or make a truly massive quilt out of thousands of tiny little diamonds of fabric! The choice is yours. Bye!