Jane Austen’s Wardrobe
By Hilary Davidson
Yale University Press 2023

The sheer centripetal temptation of dismissal hovers over Hilary Davidson’s Jane Austen’s Wardrobe like a stubborn New England fog, for reasons that are a whole lot less obvious than they appear. Not only is Davidson herself a professor at a place called the Fashion Institute of Technology, but her book’s subject, the clothes Jane Austen wore, lends itself to tossed-off comments about trifles, baubles, and what Austen herself calls “frivolous distinction” in Northanger Abbey. 

This would be a bone-headed reaction, of course, as plenty of books on this subject in the last 100 years alone (including Jane Austen: In Style by Susan Watkins and also, for what it’s worth, Davidson’s own superb Dress in the Age of Jane Austen) have shown. As Davidson notes at the outset of her book, Jane Austen herself considered her wardrobe very important, no matter how smilingly sardonic she could be about it. She spent a whopping chunk of her annual income on clothing, cared about the latest styles and fashions, and wrote about the subject privately and publicly for the whole of her life. If all that doesn’t qualify it as a legitimate brand of Austen study, it’s tough to imagine what would. 

That “privately” part is the window to the wonders of Davidson’s new book. It includes not only dozens and dozens of gorgeously detailed photos of Jane Austen’s wardrobe and the illustrations and advertisements of her day, photos drawn from a wide array of collections (including the author’s own) but also generous selections from Austen’s 161 surviving letters. Her sharp, snappy private-correspondence voice fills these pages.

The choice to concentrate on all the different kinds of things Austen wore is entirely vindicated by that private prose; in the surviving small fraction of the 3000 letters she wrote in her life, Austen is forever chatting about what she’s wearing or thinking about wearing, and what material it’s made from, and how much that material cost per yard. Davidson begins each chapter with some of this chatting (from 1800: “My Cloak came on tuesday & tho’ I expected a good deal, the beauty of the lace astonished me. – It is too handsome to be worn, almost too handsome to be looked at”) and then elaborates on everything. For instance, what kind of footwear did Austen need once she moved to Chawton Cottage in 1809? 

Like her outerwear, there were several possibilities for how she shod her feet for exercise. Austen would need good footwear. Country roads were unpaved, muddy in winter or after England’s frequent rain, dusty in summer when the letter was written and full of stones and horse droppings. The walking route from Chawton to Alton, the nearest town, still avoids a lot of the road, and would then also have gone on a trail through grass.

It’s by precisely this kind of evocation of the everyday real world that Jane Austen’s Wardrobe triumphs (that and its magnificent production values - the design is appropriately sumptuous). We turn these pages watching one of the world’s greatest novelists manage her appearance and sort out what she’ll wear day by day and what she’ll pay for it – and Davidson is entirely right: it’s captivating, particularly with her historical insight as a guide.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.