Ep39: The Thing About Mrs. Dashwood's Linens

John and Fanny Dashwood are sadly waving goodbye to some valuable household objects, and we're here to explain why they really need to get over themselves. This episode we're looking at the linens in Sense and Sensibility, and the role of such objects in Austen's time.

Selected Sources:

• Boase, Tessa. The Housekeeper’s Tale: The Women Who Really Ran the English Country House. London: Aurum Press, 2015.
• Brodie, Antonia. “Marking and Memory: An Embroidered Sheet in the Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.” TEXTILE 14, no. 2: Emotional Textiles (May 3, 2016): 160–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2016.1139381.
• Buchan, William. Domestic Medicine: Or a Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases by Regimen and Simple Medicines. 14th ed. London, 1794.
• Dolan, Alice. “The Fabric of Life: Time and Textiles in an Eighteenth-Century Plebeian Home.” Home Cultures 11, no. 3 (November 2014): 353–74. https://doi.org/10.2752/175174214X14035295691238.
• ———. “Touching Linen: Textiles, Emotion and Bodily Intimacy in England C. 1708-1818.” Cultural and Social History 16, no. 2 (March 15, 2019): 145–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2019.1586810.
• Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. North and South. Edited by Angus Easson. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Postrel, Virginia. The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World. New York: Basic Books, 2020. 
• St Clair, Kassia. The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History. London: John Murray, 2018. 
• Victoria and Albert Museum. “Linen – The Original Sustainable Material,” April 2018. https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/linen-the-original-sustainable-material.