Dressing for England

<p><b>Illuminates the interplay of gender fashion and nationalism in Victorian literature and culture.</b></p><p><i>Dressing for England</i> argues that women's interest in fashionable clothing-in dress that appealed to a sophisticated cultured and continental society-was viewed in two ways in nineteenth-century England: as a superficial feminine habit on the one hand and on the other as a dangerous tool women used to control how they were perceived. Dress could be a means of not only conveying extravagance or beauty but also influencing society at home and expressing Englishness aboard. Victorian women turned the world of fashion into an arena of feminine power. Reading well-known novels by Gaskell Thackeray and Eliot alongside clothing and cultural ephemera <i>Dressing for England</i> shows how evolving fashions-shawls crinolines turbans corsets hats-reflected shifting notions of class gender and Empire and enabled women to shape both their own identities and national consciousness.</p>