ABSTRACT
In the final years of the nineteenth century, New Woman novelists continued to utilize women's dual literacy in print and in cloth. Like earlier writers such as Olive Schreiner, New Woman writers of the 1890s assumed that their female readers understood a great deal about dress culture. For New Woman novelists entering the fray, the corset could signify just about anything, making the reactions it provoked particularly resonant and volatile. Since the early Victorian period, dress reformers and doctors had blamed tight-lacinglacing a corset to extremely small dimensions for a variety of female maladies, including neurasthenia and consumption. More commonly, people worried that lacing too tightly made women vain and trivial. It turned them into slaves to fashion, willing to deform their bodies into a silhouette characterized as unnatural, unhealthy, or, even worse, uncivilized. Despite these concerns, the corset remained an expected article of dress for all free-born British women throughout the Victorian and into the Edwardian periods.
