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
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