Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction

Christine Bayles Kortsch asks us to shift our understanding of late Victorian literary culture by examining its inextricable relationship with the material culture of dress and sewing, what Kortsch terms "dress culture." Focusing on novels by writers such as Olive Schreiner, Margaret Oliphant, and Gertrude Dix and periodicals like The Englishwomen's Domestic Magazine, Kortsch's book broadens our view of New Woman fiction and its relationship both to dress culture and to contemporary women's fiction.