The complaints about Winchester Cathedral’s proposed Jane Austen statue have quieted down lately, or so I conclude from the silence of my Google alert. Meanwhile, a smaller tribute to Austen recently took its place in the magnificent building where she’s buried, and so far, no one seems to be objecting.
In the 1930s, a crack team of volunteer embroiderers painstakingly stitched magnificent kneelers and pew cushions based on designs created by Louisa Pesel and Sybil Blunt. But one planned design—a kneeler featuring the names of Austen and two other famous women with Hampshire connections—was never undertaken.
The bestselling novelist Tracy Chevalier saw the unrealized design while she was at the cathedral promoting her 2019 historical novel A Single Thread, whose fictional protagonist is a member of Winchester’s real-life embroidery corps. With the help of what Church Times* discreetly calls “a significant donation” from Chevalier, a new kneeler based on an updated version of the Austen design was commissioned.
And now it’s done! And it’s . . . underwhelming, if you ask me: Just the three names—those of Austen, Florence Nightingale, and the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic novelist Charlotte Yonge—amid some geometrical bordering and adornment.
I don’t doubt that the stitching required enormous skill--according to a dedicatory sermon by one of the cathedral canons, it took broderer Margaret Bingham two years to complete--but the modernized design (see below left) seems minimally connected to any of the women represented. At least the original version (below right) threw in a couple of lamps, in tribute to Nightingale’s nickname, along with a daisy chain, in reference to the title of one of Yonge's now largely forgotten books. (Even then, not much about Austen, though.) A less representational version of the daisies made it into the new design, but that's about it.
Still, better something than nothing: It’s surely appropriate that Austen—herself a dab hand with a needle, according to her nephew’s memoir—should be memorialized in the cathedral’s world-famous stitchery collection.
The new cushion, to be known as "The Women's Kneeler," was assigned to a stall during the dedicatory service. Perhaps the citizens of Winchester can use it when they’re offering prayers of repentance for their treatment of Jane Austen's statue.
* As a fan of Barbara Pym, that chronicler of mid-twentieth-century Anglican life, I am truly delighted to find occasion to quote Church Times, often mentioned in her novels.
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