Dressed in Fiction

Dressed in Fiction traces the deployment of dress in key fictional texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Defoe's Roxana to Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Edith Wharton's House of Mirth. Covering a range of topics, from the growth of the middle classes and the association of luxury with vice, to the reasons why wedding dresses rarely ever symbolize happiness, the book presents a unique study of the history of clothing through the most popular and influential literature of this time.