Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction: Literacy, Textiles, and ActivismIn her immensely readable and richly documented book, Christine Bayles Kortsch asks us to shift our understanding of late Victorian literary culture by examining its inextricable relationship with the material culture of dress and sewing. Even as the Education Acts of 1870, 1880, and 1891 extended the privilege of print literacy to greater numbers of the populace, stitching samplers continued to be a way of acculturating girls in both print literacy and what Kortsch terms "dress culture." Kortsch explores nineteenth-century women's education, sewing and needlework, mainstream fashion, alternative dress movements, working-class labor in the textile industry, and forms of social activism, showing how dual literacy in dress and print cultures linked women writers with their readers. Focusing on Victorian novels written between 1870 and 1900, Kortsch examines fiction by writers such as Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Margaret Oliphant, Sarah Grand, and Gertrude Dix, with attention to influential predecessors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontė, and George Eliot. Periodicals, with their juxtaposition of journalism, fiction, and articles on dress and sewing are particularly fertile sites for exploring the close linkages between print and dress cultures. Informed by her examinations of costume collections in British and American museums, Kortsch's book broadens our view of New Woman fiction and its relationship both to dress culture and to contemporary women's fiction. |
Contents
| 1 | |
2 The Needle Dipped in Blood | 23 |
The Victorian Corset | 55 |
Haunting the Dress Shop | 105 |
New Women Sew a New World | 141 |
Ode to a Dishrag | 179 |
| 185 | |
| 197 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic aestheticism Alison Angelica argues art needlework artistic Aunt Victoria Barbara Morris beauty become Bertie Beth Book Beth's British clothing color corset corsetry created critics daughter domestic dress culture dress reform dressmaking Drumcarro dual literacy Edwardian Elizabeth embroidery fabric fallen woman fancy fashion female feminine feminist fiction figure garments gender girls gown Heavenly Twins Hepworth Dixon heroine hourglass corset husband Image-Breakers intellectual Janet Arnold Kirsteen knitting labor lace lady late Victorian women Leslie Linton London Lydia Becker Magazine Margaret Oliphant Martineau Mary Barton middle-class Miss Jean mother movement narrator needle needlewomen nineteenth century novel Oliphant's Olive Schreiner patterns popular protagonist Punch Rational Dress Rational Dress Society reader reading Rebekah Redgold relationship Rosalind sampler Sarah Grand schools Schreiner's seamstresses sexual skills small waist social socialist stitches Story style textile tight-lacing traditional University Press Venus de Milo Victorian period Victorian women writers wear Woman novels working-class women York