ABSTRACT
During the nineteenth century, the Indian shawl of traditional dress and legend was transformed, through the processes of imperialism, trade, industrialisation and artistic evolution, into the paisley shawl of British fashion. This chapter examines the ways in which authors utilise the paisley shawl's complex legacies to tell the heroine's story and weave their own narratives within its intricate patterns and mysterious symbolism. It reviews the paisley shawl through history and literature from fifteenth-century India, along the trade routes of Asia and Europe, and the politics of the British Empire, to the draperies and popular literature of Victorian Britain. The symbolic connotations of the garment changed in subtle, nevertheless significant, ways to fashion the evocative garments worn by Victorian heroines Isabel Vane (East Lynne), Lady Audley (Lady Audley's Secret), Lydia Gwilt (Collins's Armadale), and Miss Brown (Miss Brown). In these novels, the paisley shawl figures as a spoil of Empire, an exotic artefact, a mass-produced fashion accessory and an objet d'art.
