Tag: #writing

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19th Century Fashion Primer (aka another excuse for costume porn)

Julia Bennet

So I was reading a book the other day when I came across the following (paraphrased) sentence:

“The empire line dress she wore accentuated her small waist.”

No. No, it didn’t. Because this is what empire line dresses actually look like.


  • 1810 ca. Evening Dress via Pinterest
  • Costumes from Pride and Prejudice (1995), via Pinterest

And, you’ll notice, the one thing they don’t accentuate? Yup. The waist. They do wonders for the bosom though.

Now, I am by no means an expert on 19th century fashion (or any fashion, if we’re being honest) and I’m sure I make plenty of mistakes in my books when it comes to clothes. But this was an egregious error for someone writing in the regency era to make. So, thought I, let’s track those waistlines and other major fashion developments in a handy beginner’s guide using lots of pretty pictures of extant dresses and movie costumes. That way, we still won’t get it right all the time but hopefully we can avoid any major howlers. And, lo, this post was born.

I think women must have breathed a bit easier in those empire-line gowns. Their corsets wouldn’t have needed to be cinched quite so tightly. Unfortunately, by the 1820s, waists had dropped again and skirts were fuller.


  • 1828 Robe de cour , via Pinterest
  • Costume from Burke & Hare (2010)

By the 1830s, when Queen Victoria took the throne, the waist drop is complete, corsets are cinched tight again, and the skirts are taking on the bell-shape we associate with the Victorians.

  • Actual dress belonging to Queen (then Princess) Victoria (1835)
  • Costume from Young Victoria.

In the 1840s, necklines became lower (note the fichu in the image on the left below, which preserved a lady’s modesty despite “plummeting” necklines) and waists narrowed to a V. See how the waistline has continued to descend?

  • Day Dress, 1840s, via Pinterest
  • Jane Eyre (2006)

The 1850s is when the first artificial cage crinoline was invented and, not coincidentally, the decade in which skirts got really, really wide. And you did not want to stand next to an open flame while wearing one of these:

The silhouette of the 1860s is very familiar to people because of films like Gone with the Wind. Skirts got narrower at the top, but even wider at the bottom and fuller in the back.


  • Worth evening dress ca. 1865-67 , Via Pinterest
  • The King and I (1956)

The 1870s are when the bustle era began. Skirts slowly narrowed and the backside ended up piled with fabric. The costume from The Age of Innocence below is perhaps my favorite film costume of all time.

  • 1870s, via Pinterest
  • The Age of Innocence (1993)

The bustle had a resurgence in the the early 1880s and became more shelf-like. One well known caricature shows women re-imagined as snails. At the same time, the reform dress movement was catching on, which resulted in a more natural shape as with the tea gown in the middle below.

  • Walking dress, via Pinterest
  • Tea Gown (c. 1885) via The Met
  • Costume from Sherlock Holmes (2010)

Which brings us to the 1890s when the bustle and crinoline were both abandoned completely. The waist was extra small but skirts followed the natural line of a woman’s body. It was also the decade of massive sleeves.

  • c. 1891-2, via Pinterest
  • Costume from Crimson Peak

Now in a work of fiction, most of this doesn’t matter, first because fashion-sense varied then just as it does now, and, second, because how much detailed description of dresses do you really need to include? But if you say a gown has an empire waist, don’t also say that it accentuates the wearer’s waist because that’s… well, it annoys me and, more importantly, it might take your reader out of the story.

Mostly though, I just wanted to post pictures of pretty dresses.

Book News

How I Got My Agent

Julia Bennet

FairyGodmother

I am beyond thrilled to have accepted an offer of representation from the amazing Jessica Alvarez of BookEnds Literary.

I wish I had some wisdom to impart on the subject of how to go about getting an agent. But, beyond “Write a book, submit it to respected agents who represent your genre, and hope you find someone who loves it,” I’m afraid I’ve got nothing.

How did this happen? I only starting querying the manuscript in July.

I don’t send out big batches of queries. I research each agent until I’m pretty sure I would love to work with them. (Obviously you don’t know how well your personalities will mesh until you interact a bit.) So, in that three month period, I sent out a total of three queries. Of the three, one agent sent me a lovely, encouraging rejection, saying she really liked what she’d read and urging me to keep querying. The second response was Jessica’s. And she wanted to call me.

I can’t tell you how it felt to read those words. All aspiring writers long for The Call. Was this it? The email said she liked the manuscript but a call from an agent isn’t necessarily the call. I know because I googled it.

Then I visited Jessica’s twitter which I’d been stalking for ages and saw this tweet:

Could she be talking about my manuscript? Could she have liked it to this degree? And if she had, did that mean she wanted to represent me?

Because it was half-term and my 6 year old was home, I suggested we talk in the evening, which meant I had to wait hours to find out. And as you can imagine, it was all I could think about.

I’m happy to say the call was The Call.

I already knew I wanted to work with Jessica and the fact that she was lovely on the phone made me even more certain. She seemed to be offering representation. She even said point-blank “I’d love to work on this with you.” You’d think at that point, I’d have believed her but after we’d talked for another ten minutes, it still hadn’t sunk in.

“So, just to clarify,” I said, “Are you offering representation?”

There was a short pause during which I suspect Jessica questioned my sanity.

“Yes,” she said.

Reader, I’m not sure – I was bright red and shaking at this point – but I think I might have actually said the word “Hooray.” (I sometimes channel Emma Thompson when I’m nervous, or at least I like to think so.)

I asked for time to reflect because all the advice says you should. But I wouldn’t have queried Jessica if I didn’t think she was wonderful, and it was so hard to keep that ‘yes’ in. I made myself think things through seriously but I confess I only managed a couple of hours before I emailed to accept her offer.

Now, four days later, I’m still walking on air.

writing

Using Clothes to Construct Character

Julia Bennet

A better title for this post might be An Excuse to Share Costume Porn. I mean look at this:

Hot pink corset

 

Sometimes I think if it wasn’t for costume dramas, we’d have convinced ourselves that Victorians dressed entirely in sepia tones.  One of my favorite parts of researching the Victorian era has been discovering all the amazing and colorful clothes wealthy women wore.

When I started writing, I had no idea how character development could dictate costume or how useful descriptions of clothing could be for conveying small nuances of character.

Before I get into specifics, I want to note that I almost never use just one image to help me describe clothing (or for that matter faces). Half the fun for readers is using their imagination and I don’t think they particularly like to be told “No, this is what that dress/face really looks like.” But I like to use visual aids while I’m writing. It helps me keep things historically accurate and reminds me that my male protagonist will never unzip my heroine’s dress.

In the prologue of my first manuscript Ruled by Desire, my heroine Francesca is young enough that she’s still being told what to wear by her guardians. Hence these otherwise out of character inspirations:

The scene is in the hero James’s point of view. Pretty though the dress is meant to be, he takes a dim view:

“Rows of white ruffles covered her from neck to ankle. All that fabric obscured her figure, but she might be hiding a decent bosom under there for all he knew … She was a perfect debutante. Girls like her thronged the ballrooms of London during the season. If he discovered they assembled them in a factory somewhere, he’d feel only mild surprise.”

The description of the dress is brief but it tells us that Francesca is following convention when it comes to her wardrobe, something that has changed by the time we meet her again:

“She’d cast aestheticism aside for less practical attire, taming and restraining her unruly curves. The ruby-red silk, though vivid and unashamed like its wearer, revealed no more than was proper. He saw a hint of upper arm bracketed by short sleeves and long white gloves, and the gentle swell of her décolletage almost always concealed behind the black feathers of her fan. She didn’t go out of her way to display herself, but she disdained to hide.”

This red dress is one of the few times I didn’t use something from the era as my guide. Instead I used this costume from The Age of Innocence:

AgeofInnocencegown

I’ve loved this costume since I saw the movie back when it first came out.

As for James himself:

“He put a clean handkerchief into her hand. “Take care of it. It’s very fashionable.”

She tried to smile, but it came out wobbly. “A fashionable handkerchief? I never heard of such a thing.” She accepted the small white square and unfolded it. His valet must have slipped it into his pocket this morning. Four neat creases divided it into precise quarters. So much care taken over something insignificant.”

James is rich and privileged, from a set and rank that take fashion very seriously. But whereas an aristocrat might be socially prominent enough to flout the rules, James, as a mere gentleman, must make sure he dresses the right way. We also see how puzzling and trivial all this seems to Francesca.

One of my favorite items that I found was this brooch:

Hummingbird

Isn’t it awful?

In my story, it belongs to James’s aunt, Mrs. Price.

““What an extraordinary brooch,” he said, after he’d taken a sip of tea. Actually brooch didn’t seem the right word for what was in fact the stuffed and severed head of a hummingbird, its beak dipped in gold, pinned to the breast of her lemon yellow gown. It must have been a beautiful creature once. Even now, its feathers shone red and gold in the light.

“You like Freddy, do you?” She stroked the bird under his chin, pursing her lips in thought.

Mrs. Price isn’t an out an out villain, but she’s extremely selfish. It doesn’t occur to her that there’s anything cruel or macabre about this bit of jewelry. She sees nothing inconsistent in her naming of the dead bird. Similarly, when she commits a cruelty, it never occurs to her that she might be in the wrong or that there’s any other point of view.

Poor Freddy. Since I can’t bring myself to end the post on that image, here’s a quick slideshow of dresses that I loved that didn’t make it into the story.

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(All images via Pinterest)
Writer's Life

Getting Inspired : Pinterest

Julia Bennet

Whenever I get stuck, I turn to Pinterest. Yes, there are more ads these days, but when the page stays determinedly blank, I find a store of images on which to focus invaluable. I make a pin board for each story I plan to write, and fill it with anything that sparks an idea, no matter how minor that idea might be. I use everything from paintings by old masters to songs and music videos to snatches of poetry.

Here are just a few examples from the board I made for my second manuscript Heart of Ice.

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Image 1: This painting by Kelly Vivanco (You can buy her art at kellyvivanco.com) raises so many questions. The girl looks innocent and sweet but I can’t help but think there’s a little more than tea in that pot. Helen Grey, the heroine of Heart of Ice, has been locked in an insane asylum for ten years. Her nurse is physically violent. In the circumstances, who could blame her for occasionally spiking the tea?

Image 2: Dr. John Butler’s Electric Massage machine. Rumour has it that the vibrator was invented by Victorian doctors as a cure for hysteria. As to whether it’s true, in her book Unmentionable Therese Oneill says definitely not. But then I read The Technology of Orgasm by Rachel P. Maines which is literally an entire book about how it is true. It certainly makes one wonder about the mentality of the doctors who administered this “cure”. Helen doesn’t undergo that particular indignity but the Victorian obsession with female sexual desire was definitely front and centre in my mind while I wrote.

Image 3: Floor plan of a Victorian kitchen. I don’t know about you but I don’t have a scullery (or a pantry or a larder) and when I realised I needed to set scenes in the kitchen, I didn’t want to get things wrong. I don’t describe the kitchen in great detail since it’s not important to the story and I didn’t want to get bogged down in unnecessary detail, but I still needed to know what it looked like so that I wouldn’t make my characters walk through walls, jolting the reader out of the story.

Image 4: Water is an important motif in Heart of Ice. I knew there’d be several scenes that involved bathing of various kinds and, when I saw this painting by Jean Baptiste Mallet, I knew exactly where I wanted to set some of them. The stone and stained glass make this a bit different from your usual bathroom.

Image 5: I’ve saved the best till last. Will, the hero of  Heart of Ice, has a dog. He’s called Hector and he’s awesome. He was going to suffer from melancholia but then I re-read Jennifer Crusie’s Anyone But You and realised this was not the brilliant and unique idea I’d first thought. (Just to clarify, it is a brilliant idea but Crusie’s already done it). These days Hector is relatively well-adjusted and often shows better sense than the humans around him.

If you get the chance, check out my boards. Many of them are to do with my writing and my research into the Victorian period, and I also have a board for my Top 100 Romance novels. I know I couldn’t write well in this genre if I didn’t also love it as a reader.