Carol Bond Blog: Lies Jane Austen Never Told Me

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single young lady desiring to secure a husband, must wear white.”

Okay, I confess, that’s not a Jane Austen quote. However, a common belief is that Regency London debutantes had to wear white. It’s also wrong.

First of all, the term debutante was not used in Regency England. Yes, the word existed but not in the context that we think of it now. Debutante, as it applies to a young lady having her debut into society, is a term that the Victorians adopted a couple of decades after the Regency.

Secondly, there was no hard and fast rule during the Regency that young ladies who were newly “out” had to wear white. They could, in fact, wear whatever color they chose. Many ladies young and old wore white but many more wore pastels.

White and pastel were fashionable. These lighter colors were extremely difficult to keep clean, so wearing a pristine light-colored gown proclaimed one’s wealth. Without today’s modern streets, sidewalks, street sweepers—and automobiles instead of horses with all the messes they make—keeping one’s clothes proved a challenging task amid the muck and mud of earlier eras. Such delicate colors were impractical for anyone less affluent to wear because they couldn’t keep it clean and unspoiled. Unlike the very wealthy, the working classes didn’t have an army of servants to do their laundry, and they couldn’t afford to simply cast off and replace stained clothing.

Fashionable ladies wore richer colors, too. All one must do is look at any historical clothing museum to understand the popularity of the whole rainbow of colors—even red.

Expensive fabrics such as silk, the quality of cut and stitching, as well as all the trimmings were another sign of wealth and taste. All the braids, lace, ribbons (called ‘ribbands’ in older writing) and feathers cost a great deal of money, and also divided the classes.

So why do we have this false belief that unmarried young ladies were only allowed to wear white? Because that’s what we read in historical novels. The queen of the modern Regency Romance, Georgette Heyer, was a careful researcher, but she didn’t have access to the internet or the wealth of information we have now, nor did she have writers’ groups and fellow history geeks to help her ferret out information. In addition to whatever primary source books she could find, Heyer relied heavily on her grandmother’s memory, and grandmama grew up in the Late Victorian/early Edwardian Era, so things had changed. Debutants wore white in Heyer’s novels, so of course, we believed that was a hard-and-fast-rule.

A common theory to explain Heyer’s occasional inaccuracies was that she deliberately lied! The belief is that she deliberately wrote in misinformation to see who was copying her instead of doing their own research. However, I can’t believe she’d do that—she was too methodical to have purposely written something wrong just to trip up another author.

Heyer novels, like any fictional accounts, should be read and enjoyed as fiction, and not as a source upon which to base research—unless, of course, it is Jane Austen. It is a truth, universally accepted, that Austen’s books are accurate since she lived in that time and wrote about characters who lived at that time, too.

As a Regency Romance author, I make every possible attempt to keep my novels historically accurate, but since I didn’t live in the era, I don’t know everything either. (I know—shocking, right?) In my continuing research, I learn new facts almost daily–sometimes details I didn’t get quite right in earlier books. However, each book is better researched than the last because each new one is the culmination of my knowledge, and that’s the best I can do. Historical accuracy is important to me, but if I wanted until I knew everything, I would not have published a single novel yet. I hope you enjoy the discovery with me.

Sources:

Years of my own research, plus numerous museum visits in England. However, you might also enjoy these sources:

Fashions in the Era of Jane Austen, by Jody Gayle

Candice Hern

Risky Regencies