Novels, Needleworks, and Empire

Chloe Wigston Smith is professor of eighteenth-century literature at the University of York, where she teaches in the Department of English and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. She is the author of Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.

Finalist for the Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize, sponsored by the Texas A&M UniversityShortlisted for the Kenshur Prize, sponsored by the Bloomington Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies“Closely worked, beautifully stitched: a whole new story about imaging the world and the novel in the hands of women in eighteenth-century Britain and early America unfolds before your eyes.”—Ros Ballaster, author of Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1668–1785“Chloe Wigston Smith’s stunning book shows how women fashioned their own imaginative empire with needle, fabric, and thread as well as their printed words.”—Joseph Roach, Yale University“Beautifully written and illustrated, Novels, Needleworks, and Empire unearths an incredible array of handicrafts that will forever change the ways we think about gender, race, and empire in the Atlantic world—a must-read for anyone interested in the material cultures of the long eighteenth century.”—Crystal B. Lake, author of Artifacts: How We Think and Write About Found Objects“Inspired by the knits, knots, and webs of eighteenth-century makers, this impressively researched book gathers an astonishing archive of texts and textiles, needlework and novels, to reveal the myriad entanglements between domestic practice and transoceanic empire.”—Sean Silver, Rutgers University