Bøker av Alison Adburgham

First published in 1966, View of Fashion is a collection of articles on fashions shows, parties and people in London, Paris, Italy and New York, including a section looking back to the surprising sportswomen of Victorian and Edwardian times. Lady M.P.s are observed from the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, the Headmistress and the Board of Governors are studied from the School Hall on Speech Day, tennis champions in the Players' Tearoom at Wimbledon. Fuller figures descend upon Woburn Abbey by helicopter, model girls weather a stormy crossing on the Queen Elizabeth, fancy goods are reviewed at Brighton, costume exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, corsetry in the River Room at the Savoy. There are profiles of well-known personalities on the fashion scene and a section on men's fashions and male models.Alison Adburgham's view of fashion is both accurate and acute; often unexpected, never distorted. It picks out the essential, mocks the meaningless and notes significance in the nuance. It is view with which Haro is in sensitive accord, and which he here brilliantly illustrates with ten full pages and many incidental drawings. This book will be of interest to students of fashion, journalism and social history.

First published in 1975, Liberty's is the biography of a shop and its various owners in London. Responding to the social pressures, class patterns, and governmental policies, the developments in the shop mimic the social changes taking place in London. It is affected by war and depressions, by trade booms and enemy bombs, by changes in fashions and taste. Liberty's not only reflected these changes but also contributed to the artistic movements and the development of fashionable taste. This book will be of interest to students of history, fashion and sociology.

First published in 1964, Alison Adburgham's Shops and Shopping, 1880-1914: Where and in What Matter the Well-Dressed Englishwoman Bought Her Clothes is a rightly celebrated and groundbreaking contribution to the social history of retail selling.

During the years when George IV ruled the United Kingdom, first as Prince Regent then as King, his extravagant tastes served to characterize the times - the Regency period being identified strongly with new trends in British architecture, fashion and culture. The literary expression of this era was the genre of so-called 'silver fork' novels set in fashionable London society. Initially devoured as authentic insights into the rarefied world of the best social circles, these novels were thus serving as etiquette primers for growing numbers of nouveaux riches. The detail and decor of the novels gives them an enduring socio-historical interest, hence the value of Alison Adburgham's study, first published in 1983, which offers astute readings of such 'silver fork' specialists as Disraeli, Bulwer-Lytton, and Catherine Gore. With an assured eye for the social context of these works, Adburgham explores the class tensions and complex social interactions behind the high sheen of the silver fork.

'This book should be regarded as rescue work. It salvages from pre-Victorian periodicals from the limbo of forgotten publications, and exhumes from long undisturbed sources a curious collection of women who, at a time when it was considered humiliating for a gentlewoman to earn money, contrived to support themselves by writing, editing, or publishing... sometimes even supporting husbands and children as well...The women who emerge make a motley gallery; but over the years that I have been getting to know them, they have won my respectful affection. More, indeed. To me they are all heroines...'Alison Adburgham, from her ForewordMagazines addressed to women have a long history in English, and have been subject to condescension for just as long. Alison Adburgham's groundbreaking volume, first published in 1972, rescues the so-called 'scribbling female' from such scorn, not least by documenting just how hard was the struggle for women writers to live by the pen.