Austen, Actresses and Accessories

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Introduction: Much Ado About Muffs

   • Laura Engel

   Pages 1-22

3. Around 1787: Austen’s Volume the First, the Elizas, Private Theatricals, and Muffs

   • Laura Engel

   Pages 23-38

4. Restless Luxuries: Muffs in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility

   • Laura Engel

   Pages 39-56

5. Jane Austen as Fashion Plate: Musings on Muffs

   • Laura Engel

   Pages 57-67

6. Epilogue: The Afterlife of Muffs

   • Laura Engel

   Pages 68-73

7. Back Matter

   Pages 74-84

   PDF

This interdisciplinary project draws on a wealth of sources (visual, material, literary and theatrical) to examine Austen's depiction of female performance, display and desire through her deployment of a culturally and symbolically charged accessory: the muff.

• access
• bibliography
• interdisciplinary
• Jane Austen
• knowledge
• performance
• play
• project
• sensibility
• British and Irish Literature

“This was easily one of the most enjoyable academic works I have read in recent years. … Happily, for twenty-first-century readers, Engel makes much ado about muffs, and in so doing, makes a valuable and absorbing contribution to the study of the intersections between material culture, fiction, and the visual and performing arts of the long eighteenth century.” (Heather Ladd, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 32 (1), 2019)

• Duquesne University, USA

  Laura Engel

Laura Engel is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Duquesne University where she specializes in eighteenth-century British Literature and Theater. She is the author of Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (2011) and co-editor with Elaine McGirr of Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater 1660-1830 (2014).

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