Seeing through the clothes of Charlotte Brontë

Some days ago we posted about the US edition of Justine Picardie's book My mother's wedding dress, and today The Globe and Mail publishes a review, where, of course, the references to Charlotte Brontë are highlighted:

Seeing through clothes
JESSICA JOHNSON
(...)
So we come to My Mother's Wedding Dress, the book's title essay. In some ways, the wedding dress tests the everywoman with its questions: Am I like my mother? Should I marry? (And if so, would I wear white?) Picardie's experience is somewhat interesting, because her mother's wedding dress, she relates, was black -- the colour of mourning. But it feels like the book's Trojan Horse, designed to bring in the misty-eyed readers of lighter fare (Wedding Bells, Harlequin romances) before Picardie can really get down to business: discussing fashion and writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Daphne du Maurier, or asking the fashion designer Bella Freud, grand-daughter of the founder of psychoanalysis, what prompted her to make a bestselling sweater that reads, "Godard is Dog." (The answer, as they so wittingly divine, is that "sometimes a sweater is just a sweater.") Picardie's writing voice is literary and poetic, like the writers she admires, and her ability to make constructions with multiple semi-colons, so rare nowadays, is as engrossing as good fiction can be. One of the stories will actually chill the spine; it recounts the story of an allegedly haunted shirt bought in a vintage clothing store, its former owner a girl who died.

For more Brontë-relate information about Justine Picardie we refer our readers to our previous post.

Categories: Books, Charlotte_Brontë