Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature

by Jennie Batchelor

Dress, Distress and Desire explores representations of sartorial experience in eighteenth-century literature. Batchelor's study brings together for the first time canonical and non-canonical texts including novels, conduct books and women's magazines to investigate the pressures that the growth of the fashion market placed on conceptions of female virtue and propriety. It shows how dress dispelled the sentimental myth that the body acted as a moral index and enabled the women reader to resist some of sentimental literature's more prescriptive advice.

Genres: Fashion, Literary Criticism

225 pages, Hardcover

First published May 11, 2005

About the author

Jennie Batchelor lives in Reigate, Surrey, with her partner and two children, and teaches at the University of Kent. She has written and edited several books on women's writing, eighteenth-century dress and early women's magazines, and regularly gives public lectures and writes articles and guest blogs on these and other subjects. In April 2016 Jennie appeared on the New Statesman's Hidden Histories podcast series, 'The Great Forgetting: Women Writers before Jane Austen', and in 2017 she was invited to speak at the Cheltenham Literary Festival with Lucy Worsley and Sarah Moss about the enduring popularity of Jane Austen. She can regularly be heard on podcasts, the radio and sometimes on TV.

Jennie's longstanding interest in the history of fashion and needlework led to her curation of 'The Great Lady's Magazine Stitch Off', a project for which people around the world recreated rare, surviving embroidery patterns from the Lady's Magazine for an exhibition to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen's Emma at Chawton House Library. She is Patron of the Kent branch of the Jane Austen Society