It is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone with a Jane Austen fan in their life is seldom in want of a Christmas or birthday gift idea. A whole economy of fancy Austen fripperies exists now (Mr Darcy dessert spoon anyone?), confected to capitalise on our nation’s love of the literary juggernaut. At first glance this pleasantly hefty graphic biography, written and illustrated by Kate Evans, would appear to fit nicely into the category of Austen Gift; and it does on one level. It’s a beautifully produced book, gentle in its colour palette and neatly conceived, built around images of the patchwork coverlet Austen sewed in her final days. But there is so much more than celebratory whimsy to Evans’ account of Austen’s life.

Evans (who was longlisted for the Orwell prize in 2018 for her graphic novel about the refugee crisis, Threads) centres Austen’s tale as the story’s spine, but also branches off into examinations of colonialism, slavery and the advent of industrialisation. Playing on the concept of patchworking, she collages text from Austen’s letters, novels and juvenilia, to follow her from birth, through the tumultuous rise and fall of her financial fortunes, right through to her death and afterlife. Evans’ own sparse but poetic words are embroidered around Austen’s (‘We are making diamonds, compressed carbon… from the hard facts we know,’ she says), along with her intricate sketches, a mixture of naive delight and raw expression. She gives us neat, sherry-glass shots of Austen’s novels in comic-strip form, locating them at the time in Austen’s life in which they were written, and counterpoints Austen’s tale with stories of the women who produced the fabrics she used in her patchwork. Muslin is ‘combed through the jawbone of a catfish’ by Bengali women, while chintz is bartered from exploited Indian workers: ‘such are the threads that criss-cross the fabric of society’.

These latter interludes force us to re-evaluate our relationship to the 18th and 19th-century fabrics that have become such stalwart emblems of the Austen brand, through their use in costume dramas. For every frock worn by Lizzie Bennet at a ball, an Irish woman lived in poverty, a child worked in a Lancashire mill, an enslaved woman, kidnapped from Africa, sang a protest song.

Austen’s life, underpinned by its 18th-century anxieties about how to gain and maintain a living, was as dramatic as the lives of her characters in its marriage proposals and snatched inheritances. But it is Evans’ eye for telling a story, homing in on its miniature details and zooming out to interrogate the larger picture, that make this biography shine. As a work of both archival collage and historical re-evaluation, it’s a brilliant achievement.

Patchwork: A Graphic Biography Of Jane Austen is published by Verso Books on Tuesday 28 October.