Artist Mary Delany

Mary read. She drew. She embroidered. She worked with shells and other decorative materials. She played music and went to hear it performed. She visited gardens and country houses. She noticed clothes, rooms, furniture and flowers. She went to dinners, stayed with friends and wrote letters about what she had seen.

These things can look small beside wars, kings and political crises.

For a microhistorian, they are anything but small.

A woman's needlework tells us something about education and labor. A visit to a garden can lead us into the eighteenth-century fascination with botany and the movement of unfamiliar plants into Britain. A letter between two women can expose a private network of information and friendship that never appears in parliamentary records.