In Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001), Clair Hughes gave us a beautifully judged view of James's delicate way with garments. She showed that he was capable of conveying the effect of an entire ensemble in a few well-chosen words, and of accurately rendering the way dress affects feeling. James, we learn, is at his most quicksilvery when writing about clothes. In Dressed in Fiction she has now expanded her field to take in the use of dress by other English novelists, beginning in 1724 with Defoe's Roxana; or The Fortunate Mistress, and ending in 1984 with Anita Brookner's Hôtel du Lac. In the final chapter, she tracks the way wedding dresses have been written about across the whole period. She concludes that the less the novelist says about the dress, the happier the marriage will be: a thorough description of the bride's finery is a sure sign of forthcoming marital disaster.

LRB 6 April 2006 | PDF Download