Texts and Textiles: Jane Austen's Gifts to Catherine Bigg and the Lloyd Sisters

Abstract

Throughout her lifetime, Jane Austen was involved in a series of ongoing gift exchanges with close female friends. Three extant—and until now largely neglected—poems, “This little bag”, “To Miss Bigg previous to her marriage, with some pocket handfs. I had hemmed for her.—” and “On the same occasion—but not sent.—” serve as evidence that Austen accompanied her hand-sewn gifts with lines of verse. Whilst recent feminist theory has re-examined the complex history of needlework as a tool which facilitated discursive practices for women, Austen's joint textile–textual gifting points to her critical engagement with the rhetorical possibilities of both needlework and text, and the extent to which these forms are contiguous and interwoven. Moreover, this article suggests that these joint gift exchanges expose Austen's continual renegotiation and reconfiguration of the logic of gifting practices.