Austen, Actresses, and Accessories: Much Ado about Muffs by Laura Engel (review)

The title of Laura Engel's short monograph promises fun, and the book most certainly does not disappoint. This was easily one of the most enjoyable academic works I have read in recent years. Engel, an expert on the performance of identities—particularly female identities—in the theatricalized culture of eighteenth-century England, builds on the intellectual work done in her longer monograph, Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies of Image Making (2011), an essential read for scholars interested in the period's gendered mechanisms of fame production. The shorter book, largely composed of three main chapters, and bookended with a brief introduction and epilogue, marries several fascinating aspects of the commodity culture from which Jane Austen's novels emerged. Engel seamlessly moves through discussions of eighteenth-century stage celebrity, portraiture, and satiric prints mocking faddish muff-wearers to Austen's own relationship to Regency fashion trends, both within her life and her fiction.

Engel's prose, unencumbered by prolixity or literary jargon, is a pleasure to read, making her work something of a wonder: an academic page-turner. Most fascinating is Engel's treatment of late eighteenth-century portraits of famous actresses that depict the muff as an equivocal feminine symbol of genteel style and covert sexuality. Her early discussion of Thomas Lawrence's full-length painting of Irish actress Elizabeth Farren (later Countess of Derby) (1790) presages the thoughtfulness of the author's discussion of this ontologically fraught accessory. Engel, drawing on the work of fashion historians throughout her book, illuminates the muff as a status symbol in keeping with the upward social trajectory of this eminently desirable actress; it is also a thing that emblematizes the intricacies of negotiating the public and the private as a woman on the stage or on the marriage market. Her inspired comparison of Thomas Gainsborough's famous painting of Sarah Siddons (1785) with a copycat portrait of her less famous and far less respectable counterpart Mary Wells reveals how the muff could serve as a signifier of different, even competing qualities. I have only one quibble with her discussion of a satiric print depicting Wells with her lover Edward Topham, who appears upside-down under the actress's bell skirt. Engel identifies the man as "sucking on a string (the bell's chime)," but it looks to me as if the string is attached to a ring through Topham's nose, aligning this subordinated man with a domestic animal like a cow (16). Nonetheless, the book presents a series of compelling interpretations of judiciously curated images and historical and textual moments that illustrate the complex cultural significance of the muff, an object with tacit functions beyond its obvious one: to warm the hands.

Engel's topic is eminently suitable for the length and format of a Palgrave Pivot book. The brevity of the texts in this series, which are meant to be read cover-to-cover rather than selectively or skimmed, continues to be a breath of fresh air in the world of scholarship. An article would be too short, a full-length monograph perhaps too long for the interconnected subjects treated by Engel here. Although potentially unfeasible within the tight length restrictions of the Palgrave Pivot model, I would have appreciated reading more about other significant muff-carrying heroines in the fiction of the long eighteenth century. Engel, perhaps overly economical in her handling of novelists other than Austen, quickly mentions only one of the muff allusions in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749); an opportunity is missed to discuss the noteworthy episode on the road when the jealous Sophia Western leaves her muff in Tom's bed in order to inform him of his lost opportunity to see her and to punish him for his infidelity. Although Engel provides ample perspectives on the paintings and prints of be-muffed actresses of the period, I was left wondering about the possible use of the muff as a stage prop...