Trudi kanter biography of williams

About this book

Studies of fashion and literature in recent decades have focused primarily on representations of clothing and dress within literary texts. But what about the author? How did he dress? What where her shopping practices and predilections? What were his alliances with modishness, stylishness, fashion? The essays in this book explore these and other questions as they look at authors from the eighteenth century through the postmodern and digital eras, cultural producers who were also men and women of fashion: Alexander Pope, Hester Thrale, Mary Robinson, Lord Byron, William Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Margaret Oliphant, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Trudi Kanter, Angela Carter, and Martin Margiela. The essays collected here ultimately converge upon a fundamental question: what happens to our notions of timeless literature when authorship itself is implicated in the transient and the temporary, the cycles and materials of fashion?




“Gerald Egan’s provocative introduction to this exciting new book poses a bold question: How are authorship and literature – so often linked to ideas of transcendence – implicated in the transient trends and stuff of fashion? The thirteen chapters that follow track authorship’s complex implication in the discourses and materiality of fashion and fashionable goods from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Wide-ranging in discipline and chronology, yet forensically focused and carefully argued, this book makes a striking and wonderfully original contribution to studies of authorship, cele

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THE FEVER TREE, Jennifer McVeigh (Viking, £12.99), 352PP

When Frances Irvine's father dies unexpectedly, leaving untold debts, her world of privilege comes crashing down. Cast out by her wealthy uncle and seemingly set for a life of drudgery as a nursemaid in Manchester, she accepts an unwelcome marriage proposal from Edwin Matthews, a doctor with whom she spent an awkward childhood summer.

So begins Frances's journey to South Africa in the 1880s, to join Edwin on the remote and droughtravaged desert plains, a man driven by his struggle against the smallpox epidemic and the ruthless colonial owners of the country's diamond mines.

It's a noble cause. But Frances's heart lies elsewhere – with a rich and ambitious man she meets on the turbulent voyage out. Full of grief over her father's death and trapped on the ship, the attentions of William Westbrook prove overwhelming. It is a striking backdrop for Jennifer McVeigh's fi rst novel. Westbrook, trapping, dashing and reeking of money, sweeps Frances off her feet. If this sounds like a hopeless cliché, better suited to the pages of a Mills & Boon, that's because it is.

Despite its masquerading as a bodice-ripper, I'd like to give McVeigh's story the benefit of the doubt. I hope and suspect that the author has painted the liaison between Frances and William as a series of clichés to convey the naivety and inexperience of her lead character. Frances falls into William's clutches, but it doesn't last and, arriving alone and penniless in South Africa, she must marry Edwin. She sees the men in her life – her father, Edwin and William – for who they really are.

That's not to say that such revelations guarantee a less predictable finale. Any twists and turns are easily anticipated. But McVeigh's narrative is absorbing and her characterisation finds its footing in the novel's later pages. Claire Cohen

THE SECRET LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Jude