This gold-beribboned, elegantly designed paper-over-board edition of Jane Austen's Fashion Bible is perfect for fashion buffs, Austen fans, and even The Gilded Age enthusiasts. It offers 21 full-color fashion plates from La Belle Assemblée, a monthly magazine launched two months after Jane Austen's 30th birthday. Ros Ballaster, a professor of 18th-century studies, artfully links each plate to an excerpt from one of Austen's works or letters, along with the magazine's original "explanation" of the fashion. The duplicitous widow of Lady Susan provides the excerpt for a "Mourning Evening Full Dress." "Hyde Park Walking Dresses" illustrate the scene of the Dashwood sisters' arrival at Barton Cottage in Sense and Sensibility (along with a description of global influences on the style, such as a Spanish spencer, French cambric, Chinese silk). A Circassian corset appears with a shapely rose-colored velvet "Morning Walking Dress" of the type Elizabeth Bennet might have worn in Pride and Prejudice.
Devotees of Austen's characters will cherish the chance to see what they might have worn; novices will appreciate this sampling of her writing--from both famous and unpublished works. --Jennifer M. Brown