The Button Box: Lifting the Lid on Women's Lives - Hardcover

Knight, Lynn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 070118891X ISBN 13: 9780701188917

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2016

Synopsis

I used to love the rattle and whoosh of my grandma’s buttons as they scattered from their Quality Street tin.

An inlaid wooden chest the size of a shoe box holds Lynn Knight’s button collection. A collection that has been passed down through three generations of women: a chunky sixties-era toggle from a favourite coat, three tiny pearl buttons from her mother’s first dress after she was adopted as a baby, a jet button from a time of Victorian mourning. Each button tells a story.

‘They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us’ said Virginia Woolf of clothes. The Button Box traces the story of women at home and in work from pre-First World War domesticity, through the first clerical girls in silk blouses, to the delights of beading and glamour in the thirties to short skirts and sexual liberation in the sixties.

About this title

About the Author

Lynn Knight was born in Derbyshire and lives in London. The women of her family passed on many stories along with beaded bags and buttoned gauntlets, and fostered her interest in the texture and narratives of women's lives. She is the author of the biography Clarice Cliff (2005), a memoir, Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue: The Story of an Accidental Family (2011), and The Button Box: The story of women in the 20th century, told through the clothes they wore (2016). Miss Burnham and the Loose Thread is her first novel.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 070118891X
• ISBN 13: 9780701188917
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320