In a world dominated by screens, HomeMade Histories invites visitors to slow down, look closely, and reconnect with the intimate, home-made traces of women’s lives.

Through letters, journals, artworks and needlework, this exhibition transports you into a quieter, more tactile past, shaped by ink, paint, thread and time. Drawing on Chawton House’s growing and distinctive manuscript collection, HomeMade Histories shines a light on materials that are often overlooked in favour of printed books. Yet it is in these handwritten and hand-crafted objects that history’s women are most vividly seen: as writers, artists, readers, thinkers and friends.

The exhibition explores women’s creative work across the boundaries between amateur and professional. From mending and needlework that provided vital income, to portraiture commissioned by nobility, botanical illustration made through travel and scientific observation, and letters that later found their way into print, these objects reveal how women’s skills and knowledge circulated within families, communities and wider literary networks.

On display are rich and varied manuscripts: personal letters which illuminate networks of friendship and support between women writers; handwritten recipe books through which practical knowledge was passed down generations; journals recording the textures of daily life; and remarkable scrapbooks, compiled by many hands, combining watercolours, sketches, copied and original poems, charades, engravings cut from magazines, and notes from friends. Visitors will also encounter manuscript novels and plays, intricate botanical drawings and travel sketches from around the world, and exquisite examples of samplers, fabrics and embroidery.

HomeMade Histories features well-known figures such as Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, alongside lesser-known women such as the historian Agnes Strickland and the travel writer and artist Maria Graham. Together, their manuscripts bring us closer to women’s lived experience.

Included in the price of admission.

An accompanying programme of Curator’s tours and workshops will focus on creative handcraft, inviting visitors to engage with the skills that underpin the exhibition, and unlock the pleasures of the past.

In addition to our donors and lenders, we are grateful to the Friends of the Nations’ Libraries for a generous grant allowing us to acquire the Strutt letters, on display for the first time in HomeMade Histories. https://www.fnl.org.uk/ | @FNL313 | @thefnl.bsky.social