Jane Austen and Crafts

Crafts – useful and decorative needlecrafts, netting, filigree work, screen painting and paper flower making – feature throughout Austen’s letters and fiction. Focusing on the plot, character and ideological work crafts perform, this chapter demonstrates how Austen’s novels made nuanced and compelling interventions into debates about the scope and value of women’s work in the early nineteenth century. Situating the novels in terms of this wider conversation as it was articulated in feminist polemics from the 1790s to the 1810s, Austen’s correspondence and periodicals including the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), this chapter contends that Austen’s fiction challenges the presumption that manual crafts ran counter to women’s intellectual labour and reveals that notions of craft are integral to Austen’s novel writing aesthetic.