Reporter Noah Hirsch-Rechter speaks to Dr. Isabella Rosner on her upcoming lecture at Hackney Museum on 17th century female academies.
Dr. Isabella Rosner strides into the lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel, Waterloo, looking every bit the Royal School of Needlework’s chief curator. Her Bronte-esque dress and striped silk green blazer are so much the picture of a needlework enthusiast that I ask if she’s wearing her work uniform.
“This?” She gestures at her jacket. “Um, no, this is mine.”
Mercifully, Rosner doesn’t hold this mistake against me. On the contrary: our nearly hour-long conversation is a delight, and Rosner is funny, unpretentious, and charmingly self-deprecating.
We’re meeting to discuss her upcoming lecture at Hackney Museum, on 27 March, entitled ‘Samplers and Schoolgirls: Hackney’s Female Academies in the 17th Century’. (Hackney, Rosner reveals, was something of a needlework hotspot.)
She speaks with the authority and speed of, say, a Rory Gilmore — silver-tongued female protagonist of hit TV show Gilmore Girls
Invitations to speak are not so rare these days for the 30-year-old American, whose blend of humour and earnestness has earned her a loyal social media following. She remains mildly confused about this online success, which she attributes to “a very fruitful time on Twitter, where lots of academics were sharing their research”. In May 2023, Rosner posted a “list of Quaker names”, an excerpt from her PhD thesis that retrieved from historical obscurity such figures as Marvelous Scanfield and Experience Cuppage. It’s since been viewed more than 6.6 million times.
I have many questions. But first: what is a sampler, exactly?
Rosner grins. “A sampler is a two-dimensional embroidery exercise, historically undertaken mostly by girls in a wide variety of countries. The earliest example from this country is dated 1598.”
She continues: “Girls would stitch things like their names, their house, some dogs, maybe some flowers, a Bible verse — probably because a lot of them were being taught in a very Christian way.”
Rosner delivers these sentences in quick succession and without pausing for breath, it seems. She speaks with the authority and speed of, say, a Rory Gilmore — silver-tongued female protagonist of hit TV show Gilmore Girls — and she sometimes traces arabesques with her hands to punctuate her point. Just as often, she bursts into peals of laughter.
She tells me most of the embroidery she studies is from “a pretty specific and dramatic 25-year range, about 1650-1675. You know, Civil War, Interregnum. So, were they just stitching through the chaos?”
I must look pensive, because she quickly adds: “Don’t worry, that was rhetorical!”
I pivot to her upbringing: how does a Jewish girl from Los Angeles, an only child raised in Studio City, become an expert in 17th-century English needlework?
“Well, I’ve always been really interested in history,” she says, “and LA doesn’t have a very present one. And as an only child I was kind of lonely, just ripping through period dramas and sewing, really just being a big ole’ dweeb,” — she leans forward in her chair and pats the table between us — “and getting a very romantic idea of England.”
I suggest that present-day London cannot compete with such stylised depictions of Englishness; Rosner concurs. “No country can live up to that,” she says. “It was actually very helpful to have lived here and seen that it’s not a Jane Austen novel actually. That was a reality check.” Still, Rosner’s Anglophilia hasn’t diminished. “I’ve always been a real creep of an Anglophile,” she admits.
Doubtless influenced by this affection for English period pieces, she initially wanted to be a costume designer, and during high school interned on the set of Downton Abbey.
“I think teenage girls are some of the most powerful creatures,” she says. “Their art is extremely relatable.”
She laughs at the memory. “That was a huge privilege,” she says. “I was unbelievably obsessed with it.” But the realities of life on set gave her pause. “I had to get up really early,” she says, with mock indignation. “I wasn’t built for that!”
What she needed, above all, was to combine creativity with academic research. She studied art history at Columbia, in New York, and during summer vacations interned at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), “helping catalog all their needlework”. This led her to seventeenth-century caskets and cabinets; these, she explains, “are tabletop boxes, the size of a shoe box, which girls would embroider with biblical scenes, classical narratives, or depictions of women.”
Rosner was especially intrigued by what these boxes revealed about the teenage psyche. “I view them as spaces of agency and privacy and ownership, at a time when girls were not having the best time.”
She had found her niche, and this desire to give expression to the motivations of young women still animates much of her research. “I think teenage girls are some of the most powerful creatures,” she says. “Their art is extremely relatable.”
She offers an example: “There’s a box in the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge, with a depiction of a woman sitting near a river, underneath a rainbow and clouds. I get extremely emotional when I see it, because it was made 350 years ago, and it looks just how I would depict it. Teenage girls are the best, and we just don’t see them that often — they’re not the ones represented in the diaries or the census records.”
Our time is up. Before I pause the recording, I ask her to sum up her career so far. She smiles broadly. “I feel so lucky. I get to hang out with girls and women who, I think, would be delighted and maybe slightly confused to know that they are, so many years later, cared about. That’s the freaking best.”
