Knitting and espionage? What could they possibly share? A lot, as we learned from reading Jenny O’Brien’s new romance novel, The Resistance Knitting Club, which was inspired by the true story of how knitting was used by women working for the British Special Operations (SOE) during World War II. With its two stitches, knit and purl, knitting is a binary system, which makes it a great stand-in for Morse code. Even more, it was knitting’s very ordinariness that made it a great spy cover. This is the sad irony of knitting’s superpower in the espionage war context: as women’s work, it has a long history of being overlooked and ignored, so a woman sitting in a corner, quietly recording conversations in knits and purls, could not possibly be of consequence. So knitting has a new potential in wartime because as women’s work, it’s never been  ...