This beautifully illustrated book explores the rich complexity of Regency clothing through the lens of the collected writings of Jane Austen.

Jane Austen was a keen consumer of the arts throughout her lifetime. The Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts considers how Austen represents the arts in her writing, from her juvenilia to her mature novels. The thirty-three original chapters in this Companion cover the full range of Austen's engagement with the arts, including the silhouette and the caricature, crafts, theatre, fashion, music and dance, together with the artistic potential of both interior and exterior spaces. This volume also explores her artistic afterlives in creative re-imaginings across different media, including adaptations and transpositions in film, television, theatre, digital platforms and games.

Ordinary clothes have extraordinary stories. In contrast to academic and curatorial focus on the spectacular and the luxurious, Everyday Fashion makes the case that your grandmother's wardrobe is an archive as interesting and important as any museum store. From the moment we wake and get dressed in the morning until we get undressed again in the evening, fashion is a central medium through which we experience the world and negotiate our place within it. Because of this, the ways that supposedly 'ordinary' and 'everyday' fashion objects have been designed, manufactured, worn, cared for, and remembered matters deeply to our historical understanding. Beginning at 1550 – the start of an era during which the word 'fashion' came to mean stylistic change rather than the act of making – each chapter explores the definition of everyday fashion and how this has changed over time, demonstrating innovative methodologies for researching the everyday. The variety and significance of everyday fashion cultures are further highlighted by a series of illustrated object biographies written by Britain's leading fashion curators, showcasing the rich diversity of everyday fashion in British museum collections. Collectively, this volume scratches below the glossy surface of fashion to expose the mechanics of fashion business, the hidden world of the workroom and the diversity and role of makers; and the experiences of consuming, wearing, and caring for ordinary clothes in the United Kingdom from the 16th century to the present day. In doing so it challenges readers to rethink how fashion systems evolve and to reassess the boundaries between fashion and dress scholarship.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s writings abound in references to a cultural materiality encompassing different types of fabric, stuffs, calicoes, chintzes and fine-point lace. These are not merely the motifs of the Realist genre but reveal a complex polysemy. Utilizing a metonymic examination of these tropes, this volume exposes the dramatic structural and socio-economic upheaval generated by industrialization, urbanization and the widening sphere of empire. The material evidence testifies to the technological and production innovations evolving diachronically for the period, and the evolution of Manchester as the industrial ‘Cottonpolis’ that clothed the world by the 1840s. This volume analyses Gaskell’s manipulation of the materiality, arguing its firm roots lie in the quotidian of women’s domestic and provincial life within the growing ranks of the middle classes. Exploring Gaskell’s tactile imagination, an embodied relationship with fabrics and sewing, a function of her daily life from an early age, this volume provides insight into the sensory aspects of cloth and its ability to stir affective responses, emotions and memories, whereby worn fabrics and even the absence of previous textile treasures, is poignant, recreating layers of recollection. This book aims to restore the pulsating, dynamic context of ordinary women’s dressed lives and presents innovative interpretations of Gaskell’s texts.

A History of Maternity Wear: Design, Patterns, and Construction explores pregnancy clothing worn throughout the decades, providing historical information, images, and patterns. Filled with photos showing extant attire, with intricate details and sample patterns that can be recreated to scale, this book examines how maternity clothes were constructed, provides historical context, and aids readers in designing their own maternity garments. Each chapter includes examples of commonly worn maternity styles from a number of regions of the English-speaking world, with information from the United States, Britain, Australia, and Canada. The book concludes with a chapter on historically accurate underpinnings from the 17th century to the present day. A History of Maternity Wear: Design, Patterns, and Construction is written for costume professionals looking to research historically accurate characters and costumes for production, as well as fashion historians and costume enthusiasts.

What happened when Jane Austen’s heroines and heroes were finally wed? Marriage is at the centre of Jane Austen’s novels. The pursuit of husbands and wives, advantageous matches, and, of course, love itself, motivate her characters and continue to fascinate readers today. But what were love and marriage like in reality for ladies and gentlemen in Regency England? Rory Muir uncovers the excitements and disappointments of courtship and the pains and pleasures of marriage, drawing on fascinating first-hand accounts as well as novels of the period. From the glamour of the ballroom to the pressures of careers, children, managing money, and difficult in-laws, love and marriage came in many guises: some wed happily, some dared to elope, and other relationships ended with acrimony, adultery, domestic abuse, or divorce. Muir illuminates the position of both men and women in marriage, as well as those spinsters and bachelors who chose not to marry at all. This is a richly textured account of how love and marriage felt for people at the time—revealing their unspoken assumptions, fears, pleasures, and delights.

Completing Juliette Wells' groundbreaking trio of books on Austen's readers, this latest volume revolutionizes our understanding of how Austen came to be viewed as the world's greatest novelist. Wells shows that Austen's global reputation was established not by British scholars, as is commonly believed, but by visionary American writers and collectors, working largely outside academia. Drawing on extensive research, Wells weaves together colorful, compelling case studies of men and women who, from the 1880s to the 1980s, helped readers appreciate Austen's novels, persuasively advocated for her place in the literary canon, and preserved artifacts vital to her legacy. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, A New Jane Austen will inform and delight scholars and Austen fans alike.

What Would Jane Do? What’s a strong, independent-minded woman supposed to do in a world of insipid dating guides? Sinéad Murphy responds by asking: Who has more time-tested secrets than Jane Austen, whose novels continue to captivate us almost two hundred years later? Whether you can recite paragraphs from Pride and Prejudice or just admired Colin Firth in his wet shirt, the romance of Jane Austen’s world is one you’ll never forget. Does love like that even exist today? Yes, it does . . . If you look closely at the women of Jane Austen’s books, as the witty scholar Sinéad Murphy has, you’ll discover Austen’s countless tips for finding the right leading man, navigating the ups and downs of courtship, and building a happy, independent life for yourself.

Jane Austen is not usually associated with children - especially since she had none of her own. But there are in fact more children in her novels than one might at first think. She herself was from a sizeable family, with numerous nephews and nieces. She was, by all accounts, good with children and popular with them. It was therefore natural for her to include them in her novels, even if sometimes offstage. This book, by one of the world's leading authorities on Austen, looks at both the real and the literary children in her life - children seen and unseen (and dead); children as models of behaviour, good and bad; as objects of affection, amusement, usefulness, pity, regret, jealousy, resentment; children in the way; children as excuses; children as heirs. In the process it casts fascinating light on a hitherto largely ignored aspect of her work and the age in which she lived.

A biography worth reading. The author has looked at Miss Austen more through his own eyes, and less through the eyes of her many illustrious eulogists, than any other writer we know of. Even when he is in harmony with the opinions of Miss Austen's posterity one feels his first-handedness. Not one of his more heretical opinions exists for the sake of saying something new. This critical study of Jane Austen falls into three parts: the novelist; the realist; the woman. Part 1 is a searching and unsparing analysis of the six novels, with particular reterence to plot. Part 2 is a more brief and general treatment of the characters. Part 3, the biographical section, is a study of Miss Austen's personality as revealed in her letters and reflected in the novels.