Historical

White Gown from “Mrs. Richard Bennett Lloyd” by Sir Joshua Reynolds, referenced in The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

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I finished The House Of Mirth the other day, which I had been listening to (specifically this version, read by Elizabeth Klett). I love the book, and the reading was so well done, but… my chores really suffer when I’m listening to a depressing audiobook. When I have one that I can’t wait to return to, I do some dishes or take a walk just to have the excuse to listen to it, but when it’s one, like this one, where you can’t do anything but watch Lily Bart make bad choices, get humiliated and reach for that chloral, and you know what’s going to happen to her and you can’t skim to read faster, it is hard to listen to all twelve hours of it. It’s such a lovely book but oh, so sad…

This dress, then, is a reminder of happier times for Lily, when she triumphed in the tableaux, dressed and positioned as this painting of Mrs. Richard Bennett Lloyd (maiden name Joanna Leigh), painted in 1775 by Sir Joshua Reynolds. She was the hit of the evening: “She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself. It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace.” There is so much description of character and so little description of physical characteristics in the book that it seems as if this is as close as we get to Lily herself…

The two best references I could find for this dress are this full picture and this detail. Since they’re not as large as I would like and you can’t see all the detail, the dress isn’t perfectly accurate. The sash is, I think, entirely wrong, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how the bunched-up green drapery at the back actually works as part of a dress. I studied it, I sketched it, I brought it into Photoshop and played with the levels and contrast and brightness and it just seems to me like a big clump of fabric stuck to her side, so I decided to turn it into a sash and not worry about it. So please don’t use this in your “House of Mirth” book report, and should you get a chance to see this painting in person, please don’t leave me a comment about how I didn’t get it right. Or if you do, at least take some pictures for me.

So, now I’m listening to Deadwood Dick’s Doom; or, Calamity Jane’s Last Adventure, which means that there are buckskins waiting for Sylvia and Iris…

Very interesting answers to the poll so far, by the way! I wonder how much it would have changed if I had had a “from Go Fug Yourself” option… I posted the link to the Bai Ling green and purple outfit in the first few comments of the final Fug Madness post, and I got a ton of traffic for that post…

Red, Black and Gold Captain’s Outfit based on Puzzle Pirates

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I downloaded Puzzle Pirates the other day — it just looked too cute not to give it a try. And indeed it was very cute, and I played a good deal of it for a couple of days. There’s a lot of puzzles to try, although I only really liked one or two of them, and the world is fun too: you can do puzzles by yourself, but you can also do them as a team, everyone working on a different kind of puzzle to make your little pirate ship sail smoothly, and it’s a lot more fun doing puzzles when you feel like it’s contributing to the speed of the ship or patching up the holes. You can also buy items for your house, or cute clothes to wear, which is where today’s paperdoll comes in.

The game has a lot of different items of clothing you can buy, and then the colors can be customized. Today’s paperdoll is based on a captain’s hat, a buccaneer jacket, flare pants and buckle shoes. One interesting thing about the clothing system is that different colors cost different amounts; this ensemble uses two of the most expensive colors, black and gold, making the estimated cost well over $100,000. Changing the colors to brown, green and white lowers it to about $7,000. So, of course, Sylvia is an admirable pirate, very skilled at plundering and puzzles, and wears plenty of black and gold. (My in-game character wears plenty of white and a shirt she got for free.)

I found this site when thinking about this paperdoll: Quid Pro Clothes, which is the website for one of the in-game tailors. (Players can just do puzzles, like me, or they can get into the metagame and the economy and start their own stores, buy their own ships, etc.) This site essentially removes much of my need to play the game, because of one reason: if you sign up for the site, it lets you play with the clothes without having to spend hours and hours saving the money first. You can also look at other people’s creations; I like this take on the Greek gods.

On a side note, apologies to Mom for driving her crazy today as I enlist her help in resume creation. “Remember it goes like this: letter first, paperdoll second” she says.

Lily Bart’s White Edwardian Tea Gown with Pink Rose Sash from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

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Now that I’m done with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I do think it’s time for another depressing period piece. This time I’m listening to The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, read for Librivox by Elizabeth Klett. I’ve read it before, but I’m actually preferring audiobooks lately because I don’t skim so much and get more of the details, and I’ve been thinking of this book since I read this New York Times article about Lily’s fate…

So far there hasn’t been much description of individual dresses, but there’s so much about the culture that those dresses form such a part of. Here’s Lily Bart talking about marriage with Lawrence Selden: “Your coat’s a little shabby–but who cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don’t make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop–and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership.”

Well, even if the book does promise to be melancholy, there is a silver lining: the dresses from the Belle Époque are beautiful, even if Sylvia isn’t quite the desired S-shape. I remember later on she wears some form of white dress, but there’s not a lot of physical description in the book so it’s based more on vintage gowns from 1904 and 1905 I’ve been looking at, particularly this one.

Margaret Hale’s White Gown from Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South

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This gown is based on one that Margaret Hale, main character of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, wore to a dinner party. I listened to a Librivox recording of it this month.

All we know about the gown from the book is that it is white silk and adorned with coral (two pins in her hair, her sleeves looped up with coral strings, and a coral necklace.) There’s no firm date given for the events of the book, but I’m dating this gown to 1852, based on this page, which makes it sound as if the strike in the book was based on the historical strike at Preston in 1853, a year before the book began to be serialized. Then, this was the gown that Margaret also wore for her cousin’s wedding, which was at the beginning of the book. It’s an inconvenient date — right there between the Regency gowns and the hoopskirt at its height. I used this page for reference, mostly.

It may sound like the book is some sort of Civil War drama, but it refers instead to the differences between the slow-paced farming communities of the south of England and the upstart industrial cities of the north. For this reason I found it a rather odd book somehow; it starts off with a wedding, a silly mother, a pastor father, a suitor for Margaret and a good bit of walking, gardening and drawing, and we Jane Austen fans think “Oh, I know where this is going.”

(Unrelated: while chatting with a woman working at the bookstore the other day, she told us she had been talking to someone who lamented, in all seriousness, that Jane Austen hadn’t written anything lately.)

But just as the reader is getting acquainted with Helstone and its inhabitants and charms, there’s a crisis: Margaret’s father loses his faith in some way, enough that he feels that he must renounce his living and find other employment. This revelation is never truly explored in the book, as Margaret seems rather afraid to ask for any more details, and instead throws herself into the mundane details needed to keep the family together. So they move to Milton, a factory town, and her father becomes a private tutor. And all of a sudden, this book which had seemed to promise a lightly romantic comedy of manners, brings in questions of religious faith, chapters upon chapters of class conflict, lingering illness, murder, deception, lies, grave misunderstandings and lots and lots of death. (And why the one character I would have liked to see die never quite made it there, I have no idea.) This is all separate from the story of Margaret’s love interest, which is its own little torment; they must spend thirty chapters thinking of each other, misunderstanding each other, and being miserable, before it is all finally resolved in the last page of the book.

I enjoyed it thoroughly, even with the heaps of melodrama, as Margaret herself is a fascinating and admirable heroine, and the depiction of the class conflict is easily more important than the romance. The strike, the union and the millowners are all treated evenly and sympathetically, and the inclusion of such themes makes the novel so unique.