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We’re all too familiar with tales of love and passion from between the covers. But it seems that the covers themselves have a few stories to tell, according to a new exhibition of quilts at the Victoria and Albert museum.

So many stories, in fact, that the curator of the exhibition, Sue Prichard, and her assistant, Claire Smith, have become known as the V&A’s Cagney and Lacey as they work to uncover the quilts’ secrets.

Take the tale of the 1829 Elisabeth Chapman coverlet. It was thought to be a marriage token until the curators found that a love poem stitched into it is actually an epitaph connected to the gruesome tale of the aptly named Dr Vanbutchel. This dastardly dentist had his dead wife’s body embalmed and displayed in his front room, where he charged people to see her. It transpires that he only continued to receive her dowry for as long as she remained in situ.

Other exhibits reveal how, in days gone by, women who had little public voice used quilts to record the issues of their time, often interwoven with deeply personal, and often very moving, stories. What was going on in the minds of the women convicts, for example, who created the Rajah Quilt as they sailed from Woolwich to Van Diemen’s Land using sewing provisions donated by Elizabeth Fry reformers?

There are also more contemporary contributions, notably by artists Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry, who recently commented: “We are born and we die and we make love under a quilt.”

Other male quilters also get a say. The HMP Wandsworth Quilt was designed and created for the exhibition by an all-male quilting group currently residing at Her Majesty’s Pleasure and reflects many of the issues confronting inmates. It makes you wonder about the comparisons that can be made between male prisoners and the confined lives of female quilters in history, whose work may have been their only means of self-expression.

Quilts 1700-2010, is at the V&A from March 20 to July 4, 2010 (vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/future_exhibs/Quilts/index.html).

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