New book explores the influence of The Lady’s Magazine on author Jane Austen, her embroidery and her most famous works.
A new book by Professor Jennie Batchelor at the University of Kent explores the influence of The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) on the life of author Jane Austen, her embroidery and her most famous works.
The book, titled Jane Austen Embroidery, is published by Pavillion Books.
The Lady’s Magazine, first published in 1770, was a monthly issue featuring articles on fashion, music and social news, as well as examples of embroidery and short fiction stories. Lasting 62 years until its final issue, The Lady’s Magazine was a literary highlight for many women, not least renowned author and keen embroiderer Jane Austen.
As a very accomplished needlewoman, Austen was known as a fan of the magazine and almost certainly of the patterns it provided, albeit without instructions.
Professor Batchelor, an expert on the eighteenth-century at Kent’s School of English, notes: ‘Having shared these patterns with today’s expert embroiderers, I was surprised to be told they found them near-impossible as they came without instructions. One compared it to seeing an image of a finished meal and being expected to cook it from scratch, which shows the level of skill embroiderers such as Jane Austen would have had.’
Jane Austen Embroidery includes 15 design pieces for the reader to try, this time with instructions produced by historic embroidery expert Alison Larkin, but still providing insights into the popular embroidery patterns of previous centuries, and the lives of the women who used them.
Austen’s connection to the magazine doesn’t end there, as Professor Batchelor also suggests: ‘It is clear there are direct comparisons between the short stories written in The Lady’s Magazine and those novels later written by Jane Austen.’
One of the magazine’s short stories – ‘The Shipwreck’, includes two characters: a Willoughby and Brandon, two names which are repeated in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. However, the character profile of Frederick Willoughby, under a partly new name, is again utilised in Austen’s Persuasion: Captain Wentworth.
In April, the University of Kent in hosting a launch of the book to coincide with the 250th anniversary of The Lady’s Magazine’s first publication.
