Patching together Austen's life

Among the commemorations planned during last year’s bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death, one of the most delightful was the Chawton quilt project – an ambitious effort by the staff of Jane Austen’s House Museum to create a quilt whose individual panels would tell the story of Austen’s life.

The museum – aka Chawton cottage, the place where Austen wrote or revised all six of her finished novels – solicited volunteer quilters, held workshops for local participants, and helped the children from Chawton’s elementary school design and create a central panel.

And last week, the museum blog dedicated to the project reported that the quilt squares created by Janeite stitchers across the globe are now being assembled into the final product – indeed, two final products, to accommodate the unexpectedly numerous contributions. Contributors included representatives of Jane Austen societies, professional quilters, and even prison inmates involved in a program of rehabilitation through needlework.

The squares glimpsed on the blog so far (here, for instance) look quite lovely. I’m eagerly awaiting a shot of the completed quilts. They will join one of the gems of Chawton’s collection, the famous coverlet co-created by Austen herself.