Both are handsome editions. The Novel Life of Jane Austen is slightly more approachable for the casual reader due to its brevity and smaller focus. But Patchwork may be more rewarding to graphic novel fans thanks to the painted artwork and a mixed-media collage approach that incorporates fabric cuttings into its pages.<\/p>\n
Patchwork<\/h2>\n
Inspired by a patchwork coverlet<\/a> sewn by Austen, her sister Cassandra and their mother, now displayed in Jane Austen\u2019s House in Hampshire, Evans\u2019 book shows how the bits and pieces of Austen\u2019s life were recycled as material for her novels. Patchwork is an apt image for Austen, who \u201clopp\u2019d and cropp\u2019d\u201d<\/a> her prose as deftly as her cloth. <\/p>\n Some of Austen\u2019s early biographers were fond of putting emphasis on the domestic tasks she undertook<\/a> such as needlework, often deflecting attention from her desire to write and make money. As Austen researcher Kathryn Sutherland has recently observed in writing about Austen\u2019s quilt<\/a>: \u201cSewing, like letter writing, is not redundant work; it is necessary to social functioning.\u201d It is apt that Evans\u2019 includes this activity in her biography.<\/p>\n Evans also brings the bookish and close-knit Austen family vividly to life. The sense of the mischievousness and rebellion that brought Austen\u2019s early work into being is present here. The comic strip renderings of her teenage skits and her spoof Plan of a Novel<\/a> are wonderfully exuberant.<\/p>\n The texture of Austen\u2019s life, and the threads that connect one life to others, is a distinct aspect of her approach. Evans\u2019 shifts of focus add context to the author\u2019s life. The material that Austen sews links ordinary domestic practice to the horrors of British colonialism which delivered cotton thread to Britain.<\/p>\n This incorporation of fabrics that Austen showed interest in during her life \u2013 with her family having to make do and mend during periods of impoverishment \u2013 is an continuing technique used by Evans in her graphic work. An earlier graphic novel by the artist \u2013 Threads: From the Refuges Crisis<\/a> (2017) \u2013 included comic book documentation of interviews with women in the Calais \u201cJungle\u201d. It embedded their embroidery and needlework in the book, made as a way of escaping the horror of their situation. <\/p>\n Patchwork uses the Austen family\u2019s interest in fabric as a metaphor for their changing domestic experience in different decades and patchwork as a medium which gets added to over time. This works well as a visual leitmotif to accompany the narrative. It shows Evans\u2019 continuing interest in depicting textiles alongside her artwork as a rich storytelling technique.<\/p>\n The structure of The Novel Life of Jane Austen echoes the typical triple volume publication of novels at the time. Budding Writer, Struggling Artist and Published Author indicate distinct phases of Austen\u2019s writing life. They begin with a letter from August 1796 and end with Cassandra\u2019s destruction of some of the correspondence in 1844 (the last pages acknowledge how her final house in Chawton has become a pilgrimage site for fans).<\/p>\n Barchas and Greenberg give a strong sense of Austen\u2019s links with other writers, such as Shakespeare, whose \u201cstunning literary celebrity\u201d prefigures her own. For Evans, fictional influences can be seen in the presence on Austen\u2019s bookshelf of those professional women authors (Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, for example) who did so much to set the stage for Austen\u2019s success. However Samuel Richardson, whom Austen both revered and parodied<\/a>, Henry Fielding, from whom she derived much of her facility with the burlesque<\/a> and Samuel Johnson, an important influence on her sentence structure and tone<\/a>, are either absent or fleetingly mentioned. <\/p>\n Like Evans, artist Isabel Greenberg uses a technique to contrast one aspect of Austen\u2019s creative practice with another. While Evans contrasts Austen\u2019s making patchwork fabrics with her writing, as two different but related creative pursuits, Greenberg uses different colour schemes to delineate ways that the author\u2019s imagination operated at different times. <\/p>\n Most of the colour scheme is a combination of yellow and blue, including renditions of both Austen\u2019s biography and performances of her novels. However, for scenes where the novelist enters a moment of reverie \u2013 imagining her characters\u2019 inner lives \u2013 the colours used become red, purple and yellow. This signifies heightened feelings in contrast to the more muted emotions observed in her everyday life.<\/p>\n As with Evans\u2019 mixed-media approach to graphic novel art, Greenberg\u2019s use of heightened colour to separate everyday experience from imagination, is often found in the artist\u2019s work. Her first two graphic novels The Encyclopedia of Early Earth<\/a> (2013), and the recently adapted One Hundred Nights of Hero<\/a> (2016) both contrast everyday experience in different historical time periods with characters\u2019 storytelling activities. <\/p>\nThe Novel Life of Jane Austen<\/h2>\n
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