As a graphic novelist, a quilter, and an avid Austen fan, I was immediately seized by the possibilities inherent in structuring the story of someone’s life around the fabrics of a quilt that they made.
Patchwork quilts are scrapbooks of living history, the snippets of fabric they contain are meaningful, they contain memories and stories. Of course we will never know which of the diamonds of fabric in the Austen quilt came from Jane’s dress, or her sister’s pelisse, or her mother’s bedroom curtains, but the joy of creating a visual representation of Austen’s life is that I was able to use these fabrics to reverse-engineer a level of visual authenticity into her story. You can draw anything in a graphic novel: it’s like being a film-director with an unlimited budget for costumes and set. And in this case I could populate the whole book with the patterns from her quilt.
“Patchwork” is also the perfect metaphor for the process I have devised for constructing a graphic biography out of someone’s own words. We have only a patchy autobiographical record of Austen’s life, as most of her letters were deliberately destroyed. But we do also have her novels. I deconstructed all of Austen’s writings and arranged the quotes thematically – I created research documents collating Austen’s references to hundreds of subjects as varied as “death” “dentists” “fat-shaming” “mansplaining” and “walking shoes”. These, then, became my patchwork pieces that I stitched together to tell the story of Austen’s life. And that gives the narrative depth and resonance. So when we read that Jane’s home, Chawton Cottage “has no advantage of situation. It stands full on the thoroughfare, almost as close to the road as it can be. The stairs are dark and narrow. The kitchen smokes”, that text is formed of an amalgam of quotes from Emma and Sense and Sensibility, and they are words that Austen herself used to describe a home very much like hers.
A good graphic novelist, like a good quilter, creates a picture that is more than the sum of its parts. I like to take the reader on a journey in my books. It’s not enough, for me, to show what someone did and where they went with their life – I want to show who they are – and I want the reader to be not just interested, but fully invested and immersed in their story. So, like the different gradients of colours of fabric in a quilt, there are different emotional tones to the different chapters of Patchwork. The first part of the book covers the early part of Austen’s life, where her early burst of creative genius is followed by years of frustration as her professional, social and romantic ambitions are thwarted. The second part is where we see mature Austen, settled at Chawton, at the peak of her creative powers. And connecting the two parts is something quite different.
Because the other aspect of the Austen coverlet that inspired me in creating Patchwork was the physical artifact of the quilt itself as representative of the fabric of society in Regency England. On the surface, the coverlet is a pretty, decorative item, but threaded through the very fibre is a complex web of unseen historic economic relations. The chintzes imported from Bengal by the East India Company. The cheap British cottons, milled by child labour in the new Lancashire mills, and grown by enslaved African Americans. The Irish linen backing, from a nation entirely subjugated to English interests. Fabric, within the span of Austen’s lifetime, is the single most important economic driver of the industrial revolution, global colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. And there are points of contact between Austen’s life, her family, and these socio-political events. How best to draw these threads together? I decided to write a 29 page prose poem "Interlude" in the middle of the book. And to make it really easy for myself, I illustrated it with thread paintings, fully embroidered, every image created from cloth.
You have to see it really. Enjoy!
