Abstract
Chapter 3 examines James Stanier Clarke’s fashionable sketch of Austen holding a muffin relation to other images we have of her, particularly the famous drawing of Austen by her sister Cassandra, and the recently discovered “unseen” portrait of her by Paula Byrne which, like the muff drawing has not been authenticated. The chapter considers the drawing of Austen, found in Clarke’s friendship book, alongside contemporary fashion plates and as a material artifact in and of itself. Austen’s connection to the muff is a provocative invitation to re-envision her awareness of Regency style and accessories. The way twenty-first-century readers wish to imagine Austen may be very different from the ways in which her contemporaries envisioned her.
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Notes
Joan Ray and Richard James Wheeler, “James Stanier Clarke’s Portrait of Austen,” Persuasions 27 (2005), 114.
Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen’s Letters, 3rd edn (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 297
Claudia Johnson, Austen Cults and Cultures (University of Chicago Press, 2012), 59–60.
Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market, and the Business of Inner Meaning (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 211–212.
Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (New York: Routledge, 1996), 8.
Ann Bermingham, “Elegant Females and Gentlemen Connoisseurs. The Commerce in Culture and Self-image in Eighteenth-Century England,” in The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, eds Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (New York: Routledge, 1995), 502.
Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton UP, 2007), 27.
Jody Gayle, ed. Fashions in the Era of Jane Austen: Ackermanns Repository of Arts. Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics (Columbia: Publications of the Past Inc., 2012). This volume has no page numbers.
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© 2015 Laura Engel
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Engel, L. (2015). Jane Austen as Fashion Plate: Musings on Muffs. In: Austen, Actresses and Accessories: Much Ado About Muffs. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137427946_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137427946_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49129-2
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