Charlotte Brontë was famously “plain” – and possibly also vain. She cared very much about clothes, and there are many insights to be gained from paying close attention to what is left of her wardrobe. In this unusual biography, a nine-year labour of love, Eleanor Houghton even includes a bar chart tracking the many references to clothes in Brontë’s letters. The author, a Brontë scholar, fashion historian, couture milliner and costume consultant on period dramas, would go so far as to call Brontë’s clothes the only surviving “witnesses” to her subject’s life. The “testimonies” in Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes derive from chemically analysing fabrics, painstakingly establishing provenance and poring over everything from Brontë’s intricately stitched baby bonnet to the knitted baby socks given to her for the baby she was carrying when she died.
At the age of sixteen, Brontë drew a picture of a woman wearing the kind of frock she probably yearned for, with dropped shoulders, puff sleeves and a high waist. Two years later, in 1834, her brother painted her, in the “pillar portrait”, more soberly attired in a dress matching those of her sisters: dark and sombre, with a high neckline, a large modest collar and sleeves that might seem voluminous in 2026, but, Houghton writes, “lack the exuberance (and internal scaffolding) of their peers”. This painting has “disproportionately shaped our views of … [her] appearance and clothing … This drably dressed Charlotte has haunted us through the years”.
The real Brontë did eventually manage to indulge her sense of style, and this book shows her, quite literally, fashioning herself. Houghton notes, for example, how Brontë made a dress for her first job as a governess that fastened at the front, so she could dress without help, in privacy, and inserted large hidden pockets so that she could keep her secrets from her prying employers. In a tour de force exegesis of a “greying corset”, Houghton conjures up Brontë in Brussels, in love with her married French teacher, slipping away to buy a “punitive” corset, which gave her such a narrow waist that, much later, George Smith, her editor, would worry that tight lacing had shortened her life.
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