Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

This original and historically rich graphic biography uses a patchwork quilt as a framing device to pastiche together the story of Jane Austen’s life. Austen created such a quilt in her later years, and Evans takes readers through the other likely textiles she would have touched, such as the cloth she wore as a baby, the papers she would’ve written upon, and of course the ever-important muslin. Evans employs an omniscient, storybook voice throughout, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about the colorful cast of characters in Austen’s life, such as her fascinating and vivacious cousin Eliza. That distant voice, however, is juxtaposed by political illustration-inspired watercolors that highlight everyone’s emotions and flaws. Rich with creative liberties and historical detail, this is, in many ways, an examination of the world Austen lived in rather than about Austen herself. Back matter shows how many of these textiles would’ve first been touched by colonized people across the globe, and even Janeites will be surprised by some of the day-to-day facts they learn about the Regency Era.

Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This artful and thought-provoking graphic biography from Evans (Threads) stitches a postcolonial layer into the narrative by examining the fabrics worn by Jane Austen and her contemporaries. Inspired by a patchwork coverlet that Jane “meticulously folded and painstakingly stitched,” the title also alludes to the “threadbare” letters and manuscripts from which historians reconstruct her life. The seventh child in a family clinging precariously to the upper class, Jane bounces between boarding schools while attempting to nurture her creative impulses, which her father supports. Her mother relocates the family to Bath in hopes of landing husbands for Jane and her younger sister, Cassandra. Though Jane remains unmarried, “her spirits soar” (Evans implies she had at least one secret romance). But “there are other voices in these fabrics, if we choose to hear them”—so begins the “Interlude,” which visits the fabrics’ origins. In colonial India, impoverished women weave fine Dhaka muslin; cotton is picked by enslaved Black Americans and spun by children in the north of England working 14 hours a day. The voices of these workers live on in song lyrics that adorn pages illustrated by intricate embroidery woven between colorful, caricature-filled comics art. The question “Where is the line between imagination and reality, when a legal fiction can... condemn people to be properties?” echoes through the final biography section, as Jane’s fate rests on the whims of male family members. Evans pointedly and beautifully illuminates the seams of this quilted narrative. (Oct.)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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 untilSense 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. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.