PATCHWORK

Inspired by a quilt Austen made, a British cartoonist pieces together the story of her life.

“We are making diamonds [the shape of quilt patches],” writes Evans, “formed from the hard facts we know of Jane Austen’s life.” Unlike Janine Barchas and Isabel Greenberg’s graphic biography published earlier this year (The Novel Life of Jane Austen), Evans’ tougher-minded portrait emphasizes the trials and disappointments she endured. She was born in 1775 to parents who had “a superfluity of children, and a want of almost everything else,” writes Evans, making apt use of Jane’s own words here and throughout. Austen’s brothers got what few advantages there were, and Edward, the fortunate heir of wealthy relatives, did little to help until his wife died and he invited his mother and sisters to care for his 11 children in exchange for a home in…his bailiff’s cottage. Shrewd, engaging accounts of Jane’s creation of her famous novels—consistently rejected until Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811, just six years before her death—underscore how much wit and pleasure she gave the world from such unpromising circumstances. Jane and sister Cassandra are frequently glimpsed doing needlework and making clothes, reminding us of women’s historic connection with fabrics and paving the way for an “Interlude” that connects the trade in muslin, chintz, linen, and cotton to the colonial exploitation of workers in India and Ireland and enslaved people in the American South, as well as factory workers in England. Jane’s brothers, Frank and Henry, as members of the armed forces, protected these practices, but Evans notes that Jane deplored slavery: “Did Mr Darcy build Pemberley without income from West Indian investments?” The author’s point is to situate Austen more firmly in lived reality; Evans’ lively drawings similarly capture the past without prettifying it.

A bracing corrective to the more simpering extremes of the Janeite universe.