Category: clothing and fashion
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All Dressed Up with Somewhere to Go: The Cost of a Ball Gown in Regency England
If you’re anything like me you’ve probably spent a ridiculous amount of time imagining what Elizabeth Bennet wore the night she danced with Mr. Darcy at Netherfield. Was it muslin? Silk? Did it swish dramatically when she turned away from him in elegant disdain? And the all important question: what did it cost Mr. Bennet?…
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Unusual Regency Hobbies
Shoe making, graveyard picnics, and anthropomorphic taxidermy…just a day in the life of the Regency and Victorian upper class.
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The Woman Who Left England-and Convention-Far Behind
What if Elizabeth Bennet had never married Mr. Darcy? What if, instead, she packed a few essentials, headed off to the Middle East, donned turbans and pantaloons, read ancient prophecies, and hosted Bedouin chieftains in a mountaintop fortress? Of course our favorite fictional heroine never did that. But Lady Hester Stanhope, a real life contemporary…
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A Taxing Subject for Americans—and for Austen, Her Peers
April is tax month in the U.S. for most people, so this month’s blog will cover the topic. For the British of Jane Austen’s time, as well as for modern citizens, taxes were both necessary for the realm and a drain on the populace. (My fellow Always Austen author, Don Jacobson, took on the topic…
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Putting Your Best Foot Forward
Do you enjoy shopping for shoes? Are they an essential part of your wardrobe? Do you have a pair to go with every outfit? Ladies in regency England liked shoes about as much as we do today, and upper class ladies like the ones in Jane Austen’s novels were no exception. Just like today, their…
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Birds of a Feather
When reading Austen novels and or fan fiction, I noticed there are many mentions of birds: gentlemen shooting birds or out with trained falcons, dining later on the foul, and later encountering a woman with ostentatious feathers in her headdress. These are details that make me go, “Hmm.” I learned these details are not simple…
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The silly view of expectation between classes and gender
The differences between the classes have many gray areas.
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Fashionably Late: Timekeeping in Regency England
***This post is in memory of my grandfather, a watchmaker whose house was delightfully filled with clocks in various stages of testing and repair. Their continuous, steady ticking created a soothing atmosphere that turned to temporary bedlam every hour, on the hour. Then we would enjoy another peaceful fifty nine minutes before it happened all…
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To be or not to be ruined
Hi everyone. Hope your holidays were filled with the four F’s… family, friends, food, and fun. My computer decided in the middle of the night that it wasn’t happy with me and purged all the work I had done yesterday. Hate when updates make everything worse. I have been watching a lot of period shows…
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Imagining the Regency Era: Mr. Darcy Looks Rich
Or Why the Amneisa Trope Would Never Work for Mr. Darcy George Allen, 1894 I’ve come across a few fan fiction stories where Mr. Darcy has amnesia and is working as a farm hand or something else lower class. I am not going to throw shade at these stories, because fan fiction is all about…