Marriage lines: a wedding veil for Jane Austen

 This veil, entitled 'Marriage lines', was inspired by Jane Austen’s life and in particular the manuscript of her unfinished novel The Watsons, which is housed in the Bodleian library in Oxford. One of the interesting things about the manuscript is that Jane used ordinary sewing pins to ‘cut and paste’ parts of the story in order to make changes and rearrange the words. Jane’s novels are concerned with social issues, seen from a female point of view, and the way in which young women, in particular, navigate the world around them and their place within it. Jane herself never married, although she came close to doing so twice; the first time for love (although the young man’s family prevented the marriage) and the second time for pragmatic reasons. In fact she accepted the second proposal but changed her mind by the next morning and broke off the engagement.

At one point in The Watsons, the heroine’s sister, Elizabeth, says ‘I think I could like any good humoured man with a comfortable income’ which is a sentiment shared by many of Jane’s fictional characters; although not her heroines, who are all seeking love and meaning in their relationships. I embroidered this text onto lace, which I cut and pinned to the wedding veil. This mirrors the way Jane pinned her manuscripts, so that the words, like the sentiments, can be rearranged or even removed as the situation changes. My aim was to reflect the general view of marriage in Jane’s novels as a negotiation open to rearrangement as well as Jane’s own equivocal views of the married state.