Measurement Corner

Texts and Textiles: Jane Austen's Gifts to Catherine Bigg and the Lloyd Sisters

“…40 Janet Todd and Linda Bree offer a description of Austen's "little bag", which "unrolls to reveal a needle case of red (with one small needle still in it), giving the appearance of lips within which [the poem is] placed". 41 Here, the material artefact reveals that Austen deliberately manufactured her textiles to hold her texts, fashioning them in such a way that her poems mimicked the spoken word's emanation from the aperture of the body, issuing from the liplike folds of the textiles. Nevertheless, unlike the conventional sentimental accessory, or even the object protagonist of the eighteenth-century it-narrative, these sewn artefacts must remain mute.…”