The Button Box

I used to love the rattle and whoosh of my grandma's buttons as they scattered from their Quality Street tin. An inlaid wooden chest the size of a shoe box holds Lynn Knight's button collection. This is a collection that has been passed down through three generations of women: a chunky sixties-era toggle from a favourite coat, three tiny pearl buttons from her mother's first dress after she was adopted as a baby, a jet button from a time of Victorian mourning.

Each button tells a story. 'They change our view of the world and the world's view of us' said Virginia Woolf of clothes. The Button Box traces the story of women at home and in work from pre-First World War domesticity, through the first clerical girls in silk blouses, to the delights of beading and glamour in the thirties to short skirts and sexual liberation in the sixties.

LYNN KNIGHT is the author of the family memoir, Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue: The Story of an Accidental Family (Atlantic Books 2011) and the biography,Clarice Cliff (Bloomsbury, 2005). She has also edited two collections of short stories,Dangerous Calm: The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Taylor and The Secret Woman: Classics Women's Short Stories. She is a writer, editor and independent lecturer and teaches Literature by Women Writers at London’s City Lit. Lynn lives in London, England.