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As a researcher I have always maintained a firm boundary between my professional work and my personal hobbies. One of my most recent academic projects has traced the development of techniques and styles of needlework pictures and pictorial samplers made by young women in eighteenth-century England, while in my spare time I have increasingly turned to crocheting clothing and toys for friends and family. However, following recent developments in material culture and archival studies, which have encouraged reframing conceptions of authorship and resituating objects within larger networks of connection, it seems foolish to suppose that my work on needlework in the long eighteenth century is unaffected by my investment in crochet (and vice versa). This article aims to initiate discussions around the relationship between personal lives and professional research and seeks to explore how my practice of crochet and my research of textiles from the long eighteenth century are intimately connected.

Unlike popular actresses of the period who aligned themselves with virtuous femininity through close association with the socially condoned roles of wife and mother, George Anne Bellamy refused to rely on images of palatable domestic femininity to validate her place in the public sphere. Examining the unique portrayal of Bellamy in the periodical press as neither entirely virtuous nor completely immoral, this article proposes that she used her memoir as a publicity tool to refashion her public image and emphasize the legitimacy of her place in the public sphere on her own terms. Looking particularly at the relationship between her Apology and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), it explores the ways in which Bellamy characterized herself as a sentimental heroine. Drawing on the image of the sentimental heroine allowed her to align herself with other, more well-established and generally accepted avenues of female social participation for working women in the public sphere.

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