She Stitched the Stars: A Story of Ellen Harding Baker's Solar System Quilt

By Jennifer Harris and Louise Pigott

At a time when girls and women were supposed to limit their worlds to home, one mother looked beyond—to space.

In 1876 Ellen Harding Baker began stitching an extraordinary quilt, one that accurately depicted our solar system. Ellen, a Iowa storekeeper's wife and a mother, had a curiosity that reached far beyond the stratosphere. Today the quilt hangs in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. This lyrical story imagines the creation of the quilt from the perspective of Ellen’s daughters, who, like their mother, lived in a time when girls and women were expected to limit their pursuit of knowledge, and who may have been inspired to dream bigger and look farther.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780807573259

Jennifer Harris

Jennifer Harris has been fascinated by the presence of the past in the present for as long as she can remember. She writes literary fiction inspired by the historic environment—not historical fiction, but fiction set in the contemporary era that responds to the past. Jennifer holds a PhD in cultural heritage theory and has lectured in and researched cultural heritage and museums. She has run a small social history museum and worked as a journalist in both Australia and London. An Australian by birth, she currently lives in Seattle. She is a watercolourist, hiker, skier and avid visitor to historic sites and museums.

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