Women in the Stacks: Miss Frances Underhill

You can buy this pattern on Payhip

This is the name which first started the thinking behind ‘Women in the Stacks’, with a 2016 news article about a small exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It told the story of Miss Frances Underhill - employed as a catalogue assistant in 1906. She faced antagonism and discrimination about the possibility of promotion, being challenged on everything from the propriety of her delivering messages for a senior male academic to the assumption that she would be unable to climb the ladders of the reading rooms. She was appointed as the first woman librarian assistant at the Bodleian in 1910.

Whilst there are lots of dramatic views of the library (no images of the library because of copyright I am afraid), I have based the pattern on the elevation which faces another library - the Radcliffe Camera: Most of the first skein will be used in creating a squishy garter stitch base, perfect for mindless, mindful or knit-night stitching… The second half of the shawl echoes this elevation, with its three storeys each with seven leaded windows created by simple lace yarn-overs.

800-850m 4ply / fingering weight yarn
The sample pictured used 2 skeins of The Knitting Goddess Britsock in Walnut
4mm needles: 80cm circular to accommodate lots of stitches
16 stitch markers

A yarn more local to the library could be Home Farm Wensleydales Rare Breed Wensleydale and Blue Faced Leicester in Cotswold Stone, or perhaps some Oxford Down if you can find it