The Thing About Mrs. Bates's Knitting with guest Eleanor Gilchrist

Episode 116 examines the cultural and material significance of knitting in Jane Austen's fiction, with particular attention to Mrs. Bates in Emma. Joined by knitting and crochet historian Eleanor Gilchrist (University of Newcastle), the episode traces the history of knitting as a gendered and class-stratified form of labor in Georgian and Regency England — from the haptic transmission of knitting knowledge between women to the emergence of printed patterns and "receipts" in the early nineteenth century — situating Mrs. Bates's perpetually busy hands as a socially legible marker of reduced genteel circumstances. Mrs. Smith and Nurse Rooke in Persuasion serve as secondary comparisons, illuminating how Austen deploys needlework across her fiction to mark the intersection of gender, class, and economic necessity.