‘The solution to my life’, writes Alice Munro, ‘occurred to me one night while ironing a shirt.’

The subject for this essay occurred to me when the Sydney Theatre Company, under Cate Blanchett’s leadership, adopted the Italian designer Giorgio Armani as its patron. Some theatre buffs were delighted; they could see the economic benefits. Others were dismayed; the idea of linking something as frivolous as the fashion industry with a company committed to serious drama seemed deeply flawed, and the esteem in which our Cate was held took a serious dive among subscribers.

One can’t imagine Alice Munro posing in Armani; she doesn’t have to sell subscriptions to the STC. But most readers and writers would admit clothing is pretty important in literature as well as in film and drama. There’s a lot of dressing-up going on in the arts.

After that first line of her story ‘The Office’ Alice Munro fails to mention the shirt again, but the significance of the moment is life-changing. She decides she will rent an office so she can start writing. (Imagine, if she hadn’t been ironing that shirt the world may have been deprived of one of its finest writers.) Of course, the shirt might simply be a fictional device, but we do know that at some point Munro did start writing, like her character, and that she probably also ironed a shirt or two in her time. (These days she probably doesn’t need to worry about the ironing.)

I think the revelation of the aesthetic delights of a shirt—a finely crafted shirt rather than a well-ironed one—came to me when Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) took off her jacket in the last touching scene of Warren Beatty’s film Reds. She is attending to John Reed (Warren Beatty), author of Ten Days that Shook the World, who is dying of typhus in a squalid hospital bed somewhere on the Black Sea coast. Her shirt is appropriately subdued in its colours—a kind of greenish-grey, and moving in that slithery-slippery way over her shoulders as only fine silk or crepe can do. (I think it was a silk shirt.) The collar was open and her sleeves rolled up to her elbows—she was in working-nursing mode, not trying to look glamorous. But of course movie stars in one sense always do look glamorous, and the simple shirt had an eloquence that enriched the scene aesthetically but also robbed it of the realism some might have felt it needed. She looked both practical and stylish in a way that a Russian peasant woman tending a soldier in the next bed might not. But, on the other hand, it was a shirt Natasha Rostov might have worn—albeit in a slightly different style back in 1812—or any other aristocratic character who has to strip down to her shirt sleeves to aid the dying hero (in Natasha’s case, Prince Andrei).

Reds was a film that relied on emotional power rather than realism; John Reed didn’t look much like Warren Beatty and not all that much action preceding the Russian Revolution was carried out to a resounding chorus of the Internationale, but romantic leftists probably responded to this evocation of one of the pivotal events of the twentieth century and of these two Americans caught up in it. Reed was so feted by the Bolsheviks that he was buried—after the scene with the shirt—in the Kremlin, alongside various revolutionary heroes who died before they could live to be purged by Stalin (and thereby lose any entitlement to a burial along the red walls). These were the walls Anna Akhmatova refers to in her poem ‘Requiem’, walls that mirror those outside which wives and mothers lined up two centuries earlier to beg mercy for their rebellious husbands and sons from Peter the Great. (There is a dramatic painting of this by the Russian artist Surikov, who specialised in historical themes, called The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy.)

To stay with Annas for a moment: in Anna Karenina Tolstoy gives us Vronsky in all his finery: handsome, confident, perfect teeth, great clothes, fabulous horses to wear them with. But we know from fairly early on that these fine clothes hang upon a man whom we will not be able to admire. We may end up feeling sorry for him but his clothes will never be more than an attractive shell for a deeply flawed individual, a protective cover that conceals his shallowness and lack of integrity. Readers want to like him because he’s so attractive, but that’s part of Tolstoy’s intention—external beauty just doesn’t cut it in the end. Look at Anna. She is a stunning portrait of a woman who is absolutely beautiful, and Tolstoy never compromises that physical beauty. He gives us some wonderful descriptions of her skin and eyes, her hair and carriage, her perfect grace and elegance. Even Levin finds her mesmerising, and Levin is a bit of a sourpuss—and, of course, the opposite of Vronsky. We are supposed to like Levin and probably we all do, although if you read the novel as a teenager Levin seems pretty passive and boring compared to Anna and Vronsky. It’s the bad-boy, bad-girl principle. Levin and Kitty seem drearily moral and unadventurous. However, the onset of maturity as a reader changes this, or at least, it did with me and a few of my reading friends. We came to a grudging recognition that Levin is a beautifully drawn character, as is just about everyone in the novel, major and minor, and there are whole swathes of the novel—like the swathes of wheat he scythes in the fields with his peasants in a scene that is a masterful stretch of writing that on my first reading I believe I skipped over to get back to the Anna–Vronsky drama—in which we watch Levin change and grow, gain insights, painfully make his way to an understanding of himself, and Kitty, of marriage, and life itself, and yet Tolstoy never gets too close. I see that now. Anna Karenina seems to me one of the most perfectly written of all novels. It engages us on such a multitude of levels; it gives us a whole social world and a collection of individuals whom we come to know and understand; it maintains a fine balance between affection and pity, dislike and judgement. Its observations about human character and destiny are sometimes simply breathtaking.

And then I think of Tolstoy’s own wardrobe, and that period in which he affected the peasant shirts and boots and grew his beard longer than necessary and generally presented himself as something that might have been a small part of him but hardly represented the complexity of his nature. He would have needed to wear a new suit of clothes every day to begin to capture something of the variety of parts of which he was composed.

There is a very telling little paragraph towards the end of the novel in which Anna comes to greet Dolly: ‘Anna had changed into a very simple cambric dress. Dolly looked attentively at this simple dress. She knew what such simplicity meant and what money was paid for it.’

Tolstoy declared he didn’t like Shakespeare particularly, especially the tragedies. He didn’t like Shakespeare’s tendency to give everyone a point of view, the villains such as Iago included. There is much about the keen observations of human character that is similar in the two writers. This little paragraph about Anna’s dress reminds me of that line in *Hamlet when the prince says in reply to Rosencrantz’s defence of Denmark—which Hamlet has described as a prison, literal or metaphorical: ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’ Yet Tolstoy wouldn’t have liked this line at all; he was a stern moralist, which Shakespeare was not. Here we have, in a very succinct manner, a bald statement of moral relativism as well as an expression of psychological truth.

It’s a line that contains so much that is explored in the play—the lies and appearances theme, the emphasis on reason as the protection against wild passion, the tendency of human beings to justify unjustifiable actions by Jesuitical casuistry, and the tendency to lose perspective by thinking too much about something to the exclusion of everything else associated with it. ‘Thinking too much on the event.’ That’s what Hamlet does for most of the play and when he finally takes action it is without reason and he kills the wrong person.

Shakespeare—and we know so little about him that we are all free to invent our own version of him—probably wouldn’t have dressed up as a peasant; he was a man who would not have joined a political party; he had no desire to be a moral crusader. Besides, he and Tolstoy were centuries apart and the contexts were utterly different. It is perhaps more instructive to compare Tolstoy to Dickens or Eliot, who were moral crusaders, too. Educators as well as creative thinkers.

As far as Eliot was concerned, women who spent too much time worrying about their appearance were likely to be slight and shallow creatures. In Middlemarch she targets female vanity—and the moral laxity it brings in its wake—through the character of Rosamund Da Vincy, the woman who brings about the destruction of Doctor Lydgate, who probably should have married Dorothea. But his ‘spots of commonness’ lead him to fall in love with the beautiful Rosamund. No need to tell you that the results are not happy. The major problem with Eliot’s novel is that she can’t convince us that Will Ladislaw is much more than a romantic longing. (But he does get to wear nice clothes, rather Bohemian, I think.) He is never made real in the way Bulstrode and Lydgate are, who no doubt wear just ordinary dark suits. The same happens in other novels of hers, especially the overly long and deeply flawed Daniel Deronda. The only character who is at all memorable is Gwendolyn Harleth, beautiful, bored and shallow—and yes, wearing stunning frocks and bonnets and shawls—a wonderful portrait of a young woman who has everything and doesn’t know what to do with any of it.

*

A young woman got off the boat one afternoon in Paris wearing a glorious deep red silk blouse—a blouse rather than a shirt—with smocking and pearl buttons, a shirt that might have been worn by one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s dancers or a Bohemian singer of chansons tristes somewhere in Montparnasse. I wanted such a shirt so much I persuaded myself she must have bought it at one of the markets and I went searching, but there was no other red silk shirt to be found. Who knows where she might have got it? It was ageless—it might have been an antique or a very fine reproduction. It would have looked at home on a character of Maupassant or Colette or Marguerite Duras. It brought to mind the burnished colours of Rubens and Caravaggio.

There were other shirts I remember from childhood when my parents would watch movies from the black-and-white era that reminded them of their own youth. Women such as Carole Lombard, Greta Garbo and Ginger Rogers wore those silk-satin shirts with small Chinese-style collars and pin-tucks and pearl buttons, shirts worn tucked into a tweed or tight black skirt that billowed just a little bit over the top of the skirt waist—they were simple, finely sculptured and timelessly elegant, and they were, I always imagined, cream or oyster-coloured or perhaps a very pale blue. Indeed, they might better be called blouses than shirts, since they didn’t have a proper shirt collar; are those two interchangeable? Peasants are often described, for example, in nineteenth-century novels as wearing blouses, and yet we might have called them shirts.

While Marlon Brando and James Dean and Paul Newman did a lot for the fictional appeal of the plain old white T-shirt for the postwar generation, you can’t have a shirt without a coat over the top if the weather isn’t clement. Coats obviously have more immediate literary associations than shirts, or their more down-market equivalent, the T-shirt. In the 1930s, Jean Arthur could wear a coat in a way that many other actresses could not. Katherine Hepburn looked awkward in them; Bette Davis always made them seem a bit dowdy and Myrna Loy made them a trifle bureaucratic-looking. But Jean Arthur, who was both beautiful and funny, a combination that some film directors didn’t know what to do with, and still don’t, was lucky enough to score a few good roles before being thrust into an obscurity undeserved by someone so talented.

There’s a scene in one of Capra’s films, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, worth seeing for Arthur and for Thomas Mitchell, her journalist buddy—in which our Jean wears a beautifully cut black velvet jacket with decorative buttons. She was small and perfectly proportioned, and finely, elegantly thin. Her coat deserved a scene of its own; and the designer probably should have won an Oscar. It clung to her frame and moved when she did in an hilarious animated scene of smart talk and hardbitten newspaper swagger. A must-see for the coat, Jean and Thomas Mitchell, a wonderful actor whom many people may never have seen if they haven’t studied film history or developed a taste for old movies. There was a kind of subversive intelligence in his face as well as a melancholy that was probably Irish in its origins. (See Dylan Moran as a later version.)

As to long coats and overcoats, there is Gogol’s famous story ‘The Overcoat’ in which the lowly clerk Arkaky dies of heartbreak when his only beautiful object, his new overcoat, which he has saved for and found to be a source of self-esteem and power, is taken by thieves. Before this we have the myth about the coat of many colours that the biblical Joseph’s rather dopey, or sadistic, father gave to him as if to single him out and make him hated by his older siblings. And we all know what happened in this early version of sibling rivalry. Other biblical coats tend to feature as cloaks, and cloaks we can leave out. Their association with fantasy novels and films has undermined any chance of them being appealing; maybe Darth Vader’s cloak had a bit of satanic stylishness as he stalked the corridors of the Death Star, but there are far too many bearded wizards and baleful witches popping up in velvet cloaks and fur-trimmed cloaks and cloaks with glitter to allow them a place here. Cloaks have, like Camelot and Robin Hood, become very kitschy. With some exceptions, though, such as Hamlet’s cloak, the one that is ‘inky black’.

Unfortunately for coat lovers, Australia offers few opportunities for indulgence and its climate hardly justifies more than one or two in the wardrobe unless we agree to include raincoats and parkas. (I distinguish between a raincoat and a trench coat—as most espionage fiction writers seem to do.)

If a writer tells us what a character is wearing then there’s a reason for that. We ignore it at our peril. It can be, paradoxically, the very superficial nature of clothing that points up a profound truth, like Hamlet’s inky black cloak. He’s talking about grief; not the outward trappings of it but the real thing. Yet the point is made by his reference to the external because it’s a direct reflection of his his despair. We don’t imagine Hamlet ever wearing anything else in the play but black—although he may have worn a cream shirt underneath the black doublet. (Olivier flaunts a classic white shirt when he’s musing on his too, too sullied flesh.) Like literary editors, Hamlet’s trying to be invisible but of course black doesn’t necessarily conceal anything. Yet it is true that one looks slimmer in black than white, and more elegant. The little black dress is still an essential item in a discerning woman’s wardrobe. Dress it up with gold or pearls, or down with chunky silver, and wear boots or pumps, or fine sandals, or discreet ballet flats, and it will take you anywhere. I know these things because fashion advisers tell us this all the time in those lists of ‘Ten essential items for the travelling woman’. Or should it be ‘the woman who travels’? They both sound a bit like book titles.

A coat covers up. It conceals. It can also reveal a place in society, a profession, a social alignment, personal taste, income, aesthetic values. In Hamlet’s case it reveals a state of being. He is in mourning, which is a social convention, hence his suit of ‘inky black’, but, as he points out, he has ‘that within which passeth show / These but the trappings and the suits of woe.’

Comedy can also make good use of clothing as symbols. There are the clowns and the checked suits, and then there’s The Wizard of Oz off in a costumed world of its own. George Bernard Shaw, who believed he was a much better playwright than Shakespeare, gives us Eliza Doolittle in her ragged street clothes, which, when she comes to stay with Higgins, are disposed of by the exemplary housekeeper. It is part of Eliza’s elevation to the upper classes that she learn how to walk and dress like a duchess; clothing is all-important in signalling exactly where she fits into the hilariously satirised English class system. And for the producers of the musical it offered the decorative Cecil Beaton the opportunity of a lifetime as designer of Eliza’s transformation from dirty street girl to fairy princess. While the film would have benefited enormously from having Julie Andrews in the title role, since she could sing and had done a wonderful job of the role on stage, from the point of view of design and aesthetic delight Audrey Hepburn—who couldn’t sing at all—was the perfect choice. The clothing almost overwhelmed the music, the witty lyrics and the performances by real actors such as Rex Harrison and Wilfred Hyde White.

It’s the shape that matters, said Yves Saint Laurent, more perhaps than the texture and the details—which is why a perfectly cut coat or suit or tuxedo is hard to beat. He also liked black. Black can outline the human body better than any other shade, and it has drama as well as beauty of simplicity and subtlety: the little black dress, the black velvet coat, the black tuxedo with black bow tie. Of course, it depends on how people wear it and what it’s made from. Nothing is ever as simple as that. Black can also look dusty, dowdy, shapeless and heavy if it’s made from the wrong materials and badly made; if it’s faded or coarse or thick and dull or, on the other hand, too shiny.

A dress can cover up, or reveal, it can swirl or cling or fall. There are countless famous dresses in books and on film: the scandalous red dress Scarlet O’Hara wears when she’s supposed to be in mourning for her recently dead husband; the dress that Jo burns the back of in Little Women by standing too close to the fire and has to try somehow to cover up; the dress that drags Ophelia to her ‘muddy death’. In other plays of Shakespeare, too, we have the women who discard their dresses to don male attire—Viola, Portia, Rosalind.

Later in Gone with the Wind, long after the affair of the red dress, Scarlet makes—or her servant does—a dress out of curtains so she can go to town to coax money from susceptible men. The dress, it has to be said, looks rather better than most curtains would have—and this is the licence of fiction—how could Vivien Leigh have looked anything other than fabulous in that green dress? One minute she was looking at the curtains and calculating, and then—there she was driving into town in this fabulous outfit that had once filled the window spaces.

But then there are the serious clothes, clothes that can mean life or death, like the boots that saved soldiers from frostbite, and the woollen fabric Russian soldiers wrapped about their feet before putting on their boots. Such small but vital things could keep them alive in snow and ice. Greatcoats that might preserve them to fight another day, those that living men took from the dead. If you read the story of Anna Larina then a fur coat becomes more than the possession of a rich woman, or of a corporate gangster.

Larina was the wife of Nikolai Bukharin, member of the Communist Party in early revolutionary Russia, and when he was accused of treason by Josef Stalin and she was arrested as well her fur coat happened to go along with her to the secret police headquarters (the Lubianka) and it kept her warm through long nights in prison cells and on trains across the immensity of the Russian landscape and into Siberia. For some reason—who knows why, except perhaps that she was beautiful, and even the meanest of prison guards couldn’t bring themselves to rob her of her only possession—she managed through years of imprisonment and exile to hang onto the fur coat she had owned since meeting her beloved Nikolai when she was a mere teenager and he one of the darlings of the luminaries of the Bolshevik Party. She lost her father and Nikolai, and old friends and new ones, yet through all these years her coat stayed with her and became a symbol of what she had once possessed and now lost. Perhaps it remained a comfort to her, despite being possibly moth-eaten and dilapidated after all those years of prison trains and freezing marches and brutal interrogations. This is one example of a coat that might seem to excuse the slaughter of a rare and lovely creature.

It’s impossible to mention Russia and coats without conjuring up, for anyone who remembers, the ghost of David Lean’s epic production of Boris Pasternak’s famous novel Doctor Zhivago. (Too much snow, too many long meaningful pauses and far too much of the repetitive main musical theme. And what was Lean thinking, putting Omar Sharif in the main role? He must have fallen in love with him when he made Lawrence of Arabia a few years earlier. Now there, in that film, were some great clothes for men to play dress-ups in—Omar Sharif in his black sheik’s robes and Peter O’Toole dressed up in his white layers of silk and linen, with a bejewelled dagger as accessory.)

There was, in Doctor Zhivago, an irresistible train, a steam train, of course, crossing the snowbound steppe on its way to the Urals—with all that attendant loneliness and poetry of space and cold and what has been left behind—and at the end of the train journey the glorious Julie Christie in her calf-length tweed skirts and long cardigans, her overcoat and her shapka, the fur hat that looked especially beguiling on her silky blonde hair. The film produced a whole season of fashion based on Lara’s clothes: knee-length boots, double-breasted greatcoats and long cardigans graced every fashionable shop even in sunny Sydney, which barely understood snow unless it might be contained within a memory of a rare fall in the Blue Mountains a hundred kilometres away.

There have been other versions of Zhivago on film, but unfortunately not a Russian one, which is the only kind to do it justice. It is a beautiful, complex and tragic novel, even though its English translation was poor, according to linguists and poets, because it was smuggled to the West in samizdat and published hurriedly. For lovers of the novel the Lean film might have seemed a travesty, and yet it is through the film that people may come to the novel, so it may have its value after all, apart from Lara’s clothing.

More than twenty years later another epic spawned a whole fashion season of longish skirts and muslin blouses and camel-coloured jackets and hats with a low brim—based on Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa, with the complicated Meryl Streep and wily Klaus Maria Brandauer and a sumptuous background of jungle and forest and mountains and the occasional appearance of Robert Redford as Karen’s flyboy lover. As I remember he was clad in caramel and camel colours, perhaps moleskins and corduroy, or it could have been suede, and I think there might have been a cream silk scarf streaming out behind him. Flyboys usually had cream scarves and rather becoming brown leather bomber jackets. And goggles to match.

*

Henry James concerns himself mostly with the interior lives of his characters, men and women who, if they weren’t availing themselves of their own personal couturiers these days would certainly be asking for personal attention from Armani or Chanel or Dior. There is a nice comparison or parallel to be drawn from many of James’ characters in the relationship between their aesthetic sensibility and their morality (if they can be said to have anything of the kind). James is a master at portraying the substitute of aesthetic principles for those of moral concern—The Golden Bowl is a wonderful example of this. Almost all the characters in it are totally self-absorbed and lack intellectual curiosity. Their lives entirely revolve around their own tiny domains in which they pursue the consumption of objects of beauty, human and inhuman.

The one character who is without personal wealth, Charlotte Stant, is fortunate enough to have as a friend Maggie Verver, who happens to have an enormously wealthy father whom Charlotte is conveniently able to marry in order to sustain her affair with Maggie’s husband, an Italian prince who is all style and no substance and is desperate for a bit of cash to keep the old palazzo back home from falling apart. (One can be absolutely certain he would look great in a Zegna suit.) Mr Verver, a ghastly American millionaire of the kind James specialises in creating, is a consumer of art; Maggie is a consumer of her father’s life and wants only to please him: in any modern take on this story the implication of incest could hardly be ignored. The four of them, along with a couple of dubious British bystanders called the Assinghams, move in a slow tortuous dance around the theme of infidelity. In exquisitely long and intricate sentences, paragraphs and whole chapters James draws a portrait of absolutely useless people who are beautiful, rich and sealed in a world that is sinister in its suffocating isolation. He is superb at giving us their painful growth, not so much towards self-knowledge but to an understanding of the manipulation necessary for their lives to continue in the way they desire. They learn strategies rather than values or moral lessons. Unlike Robert Browning, who nailed the darkness of such characters in his poem ‘The Last Duchess’, James (or his narrator) seems morally ambivalent. At times he reminds me of a child outside the world’s most expensive and beautiful lolly-shop. He knows these things aren’t good for anything but he is addicted to the taste of them.

And all of these people would have been beautifully dressed. If you’re going to make a film or television series then who is going to opt for George Orwell or Maxim Gorky when you can have the resplendent heroines of James and the slinky degenerates of Waugh and Powell, or the fresh-faced heroines of Austen in their low-necked empire-line dresses? If you’re going to write a novel that you want to be photogenic, then choose power and wealth and plenty of party scenes; don’t choose revolution, unless you can get Diane Keaton in the last scene wearing a silk shirt. Brideshead Revisited is going to come out on top every time over Down and Out in Paris and London. Nobody wants to know about ragged people in dowdy clothes. This was something James and Waugh and Wharton knew very well and that modern novelists are also aware of, although they don’t need to be so concerned because film and television have taken over storytelling and everyone in fashionable television shows wears designer clothes and looks like a James heroine would have been required to. The dressmakers of Maggie Verver’s clothes evolved into the designers of Sex and the City.

Critics talk about the innocence of James’ American characters in contrast to the sophistication and moral ambiguity of the Europeans; yet this innocence is a dangerous quality, one that is more destructive than its world-weary European counterpart. The Americans collect people as well as art; the woefully underfinanced European aristocrats like Amerigo have to collect rich relatives from the new world. They prey on each other like symbiotic species in the plant world. There is something of the scientist about James. He observes and records and manipulates his observations and stands back with a large magnifying glass, and invites us to become spectators with him. He has developed a perfect style for his needs; we watch the dance of deception at the centre of his stories without emotional engagement but with intellectual curiosity and perverse delight: will these people triumph or will they be undone by their own deeply flawed natures? (James was a meticulous dresser himself, his biographers tell us.)

Corruption begins early in most of James’ novels and nowhere is this better demonstrated than in his fine little story What Maisie Knew. Maisie, as her nanny, Mrs Wix, informs her, has ‘no moral compass’. Well, the reader won’t be surprised about that since the adults who people the pages of this brief novel are all utterly without such a thing themselves and therefore hardly likely to provide any guidance for a child of Maisie’s tender years. Naturally she doesn’t care in the least about who is sleeping with whom; about whether her father is in the wrong with his love affairs or her mother with hers. Neither of them gives two hoots about Maisie, whom they are keen to palm off onto anybody who’ll take her. Even Mrs Wix, who figures most in Maisie’s life as a kind of substitute parent, is keen to protect her own position as minder/governess. She cares for the little girl, but she also cares for her own comfort and wellbeing and knows how to manipulate the situation to protect them.

Maisie gets to wear nice clothes, as do her mother and Mrs Beale. Mrs Wix, however, does not, and in one of those wonderful sentences of his James lets us know that ‘A governess who had only one frock was not likely to have either two fathers or two mothers; accordingly, if even with these resources Maisie was to be in the streets, where in the name of all that was dreadful was poor Mrs Wix to be?’

In contrast, James tells us, in a striking comic simile, that Maisie’s mother ‘Like her husband (she) carried clothes, carried them as a train carries passengers; people had been known to compare their taste and dispute about the accommodation they gave these articles, though inclining on the whole to the commendation of Ida as less overcrowded, especially with jewellery and flowers.’

The shrewd employment of the word ‘overcrowded’ here is the kind of thing that keeps you reading Henry even when you tire of his characters.

The one character for whom Maisie cares unreservedly is Sir Claude, her mother’s kindly but weak second husband. Claude is nice to her, and she responds with affection that is quite touching. We know, however, that even Claude, whom we want to be better than he is, will let her down, and indeed he does, taking off with Mrs Beale, Maisie’s father’s second wife and leaving her to live with Mrs Wix, the only ‘family’ Maisie can now hope to have. This is James at his most perceptive, I think, and his most judgemental. The adults who people this novel are ruthlessly satirised; some, such as Maisie’s parents, are criminal in their lack of affection or concern for their child; others are weak and selfish, like Mrs Beale, or weak and kindly, like Claude.

It’s quite an astonishing portrayal of parental negligence, and the gradual understanding Maisie develops of the way her little world works and how she might adapt herself to it. The novel is written with elegance and grace, with ferocious irony and psychological insight. It is funny, and shocking.

Then there are hats: top hats, bonnets, soft straw hats above silky flowing dresses, helmets on soldiers’ heads, cowboy hats and borsalinos, berets on bald Frenchmen, baseball caps, slouch hats and grand musketeer hats decorated with feathers. There are fur hats, snow caps and balaclavas, scarves, fascinators and headdresses. They pop up in books, films and photographs.

But hats are a cliché on film. They tell us about type rather than individuals. It’s only in books that hats have characters of their own. When we first meet Raskolnikov restlessly traversing the Nevsky Prospekt he is wearing ragged clothes; his hat is falling apart and our attention is drawn to it because he realises how ridiculous it is—a tall hat now out of fashion and falling from its original height, a hat that will mark him out just when he needs to be inconspicuous. We might feel sorry for him, so poorly dressed is he, but as we come to realise he is aware of the danger of the hat because he happens to be planning to murder his pawnbroker and can’t afford to draw attention to himself we tend to be a little less sympathetic—but cleverly hooked.

A character much more likely to enlist our sympathy is Miss Hare in Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot, whose hat is also threatened with dissolution. Miss Hare, we are told, ‘had on that old hat, wicker rather than straw—it was so very coarse—which she wore summer and winter regardless, and which gave her at times the look of a sunflower, at others, just an old basket coming to pieces’.

Nobody in a Henry James novel would have worn such a hat, not even Maisie’s poor Mrs Wix.

— Helen Barnes-Bulley