Fancy Work
Unpicking Past Lives
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publishing:18th Jun '26
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 18th June, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Blending biography, memoir and art criticism, Fancy Work: Unpicking Past Lives explores the ever-shifting tensions between family, labour and gender through the history of embroidery, or ‘fancy work’. At the heart of the book is Alice Hattrick’s encounter with the embroidery designer May Morris and her circle: from her father William Morris to her mother Jane, an artists’ model and embroiderer herself, and M.F., May’s gender non-conforming partner for twenty years. Searching for guidance, Hattrick looks to May’s life – alongside others who have found, in textiles, a means of resistance – to understand better their own queer identity, family ties and fractious working conditions in an ableist society. In the ephemeral nature of textiles, Hattrick finds a mirror to archival research. How can the past help us to imagine alternative domestic circumstances and create unconstrained lives of our own, especially when not all traces remain? Expansive in thought, form and time, Fancy Work is a radical and thrilling work that reminds us that we can think differently, inviting us to place the needle in our own hands and stitch ourselves a loop in the chain.
‘Ill Feelings is a deeply personal and deeply political reckoning with the nature of illness, inheritance, time, silence, bodies and invisibility. Alice Hattrick offers both a radical redefinition of the dominant narratives surrounding health and pain, and the knowledge we need in order to name, understand and resist them. Hattrick has found a voice and form which open up new and exciting possibilities for writing the self and making sense of the collective past: I read this remarkable book with outrage, fascination and immense admiration.’
— Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting (praise for Ill Feelings)
‘I love the quality of attentiveness that Alice Hattrick brings to their poised and pointillistic exploration of the mysterious aetiologies and affects of chronic fatigue. They excel in listening out for echoes and whispers, their narrative of illness wriggling into uncomfortable places that medicine dismisses or ignores. Their book makes you pause to think – and rethink – page by page.’
— Marina Benjamin, author of Insomnia (praise for Ill Feelings)
‘Hattrick’s ability to reflect life with ME in form and language is complex and brilliant. The structure of Ill Feelings appears initially as haphazard, perhaps, but the more you read, the more it clarifies: this is not a book of simple narrative, of gradual progression.’
— Connor Harrison, Review 31 (praise for Ill Feelings)
ISBN: 9781804272374
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
240 pages