Dressing for England

Illuminates the interplay of gender, fashion, and nationalism in Victorian literature and culture. Dressing for England 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