Category: clothing and fashion
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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…
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Fresh Thoughts on the 2024 AGM
It is ever so difficult to characterize an annual general meeting (AGM) of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA). There are so many different elements—local tours, specialty events, sometimes a major evening event, the plenary speeches open to all attendees. Multiple breakout sessions go simultaneously for two days so that no one person…
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Absolutely Scent-sational!
Continuing the stillroom theme, I decided to dig more into making scented waters. I wanted to know how likely it was that households of moderate means could make these wonders. It turns out that it was not only possible but likely, for they were made from three essential ingredients: I discovered that it was not…
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Did Regency Women Really Swoon?
Why are women so often fainting in Regency and Victorian romances? Is this a trope, or was swooning really a thing?