Mourning in Books

 the complex art of dressing in

 mourning

 

I love it when mourning clothes turn up in books. It was such a huge part of life for so many years, and now has disappeared. Discovering the ins and outs and the etiquette is fascinating: there were strict rules until comparatively recently, and so adherence to or breaking of the rules could tell you a lot, in books and presumably in real life.

I cover a lot of Golden Age detective fiction on the blog, and this means that my encounters with mourning are frequent and often significant. 

There is one safe conclusion: if a female character is wondering how she will look in black after a family death, then she is not necessarily a murderer, but is certainly not a heroine, and may be a worthless person.

Examples: The Grey Mask, Poison in the Pen & Miss Silver Comes to Stay, all by Patricia Wentworth

Lord Edgware Dies by Agatha Christie

Georgette Heyer gives very good mourning value in The Unfinished Clue (1934) - it is full of bereavement interest. And as ever with Heyer, a cold eye and no sentiment.

There is a femme fatale called (of course) Lola: shortly after the murder, she appears wearing

a long, trailing robe of some dead-black material, without any ornament at all, and carried a handkerchief with a deep black hem. Where she could have found such a thing at a moment’s notice Dinah could not imagine.

There’s also a discussion on whether billiards or snooker is the more suitable game in a house of bereavement (answer: billiards). And a claim that a ‘close-fitting’ hat (as opposed to a big one) is best for giving evidence at an inquest.

Another character manages this:

She was wearing a lavender frock that subtly conveyed the impression of half-mourning.

It reads oddly to modern eyes: we have lost the idea that lavender and lilac are mourning colours – this also came up in a GB Stern entry on the blog,

Papa did not think it necessary to go into full mourning… he went into Peter Robinson’s and asked for grey gloves, and the shop-walker, a very polite young fellow, said to him: ‘Grey gloves, sir? That will be in our Semi-Bereavement Department.’ We simply couldn’t stop laughing…

I laughed just as much. 

But even more surprising, I think, is the question of white mourning clothes. AngelaThirkell’s The Brandons has this, about a recent widow:

As it was a cold spring Mrs Brandon was able to go into black, and the ensuing summer being a particularly hot one gave her an excuse for mourning in white, though she always wore a heavy necklace of old jet to show goodwill.

[She meets her dead husband’s aunt for the first time]

It was here that for the first and only time she felt a faint doubt as to the propriety of mourning in white, for her aunt by marriage was wearing such a panoply of black silk dress, black cashmere mantle, black ostrich feather boa and unbelievably a black bonnet trimmed with black velvet and black cherries, that Mrs Brandon wondered giddily whether spinsters could be honorary widows…

 

But then things get worse – the aunt reaches a conclusion from the ‘white’ mourning:

A posthumous child?’ she added with sudden interest, looking piercingly at her niece’s white dress… 'I see no other reason for wearing white so soon.’

Leading to embarrassed and embarrassing clarifications.

But I checked up on this, and Mrs Brandon is completely in the clear, according to an old etiquette guide:

‘In summer, all-white clothes are considered deep mourning…provided that the correct materials and accessories are used. A white chiffon evening dress worn with white slippers and stockings would be just as deep mourning as black… It would be perfectly correct to wear all-black in the daytime and all-white in the evening.’

(Woman in a White Dress by Henri Lebasque

Elderly Lady in a Black Bonnet is by Mary Cassatt)

Back to Agatha Christie – her Towards Zero has a thrilling clothes moment. The house of death includes two women, great rivals, Kay and Audrey, current and former wives of the same man.  They barely speak, can scarcely be in the same room, and if they are then Kay will insult Audrey or accuse her of all kinds, including husband-stealing and murder. She claims to be frightened of her. It is seen as extraordinary that they be in the same house at the same time. And yet – when a death occurs, everything takes second place, and the two of them go off into the nearest town together, in the car, to buy their mourning clothes for the funeral. Priorities. We are not privy to their conversation in the car.

 

both clearly devastated

I also like another mourning detail - that after someone has died, in Nemesis Miss Marple

laid aside the baby’s pink coat which she had previously been engaged in knitting and substituted a crocheted purple scarf. This half-mourning touch went with Miss Marple’s early Victorian ideas of tactfulness in the face of tragedy.

Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White has a chilling scene in which a woman who has been brought news of the death of her daughter does as follows:

‘If you have no other motive,’ she went on, deliberately taking off her slate-coloured mittens, and rolling them up, ‘I have only to thank you for your visit, and to say that I will not detain you here any longer. Your information would be more satisfactory if you were willing to explain how you became possessed of it. However, it justifies me, I suppose, in going into mourning. There is not much alteration necessary in my dress, as you see. When I have changed my mittens, I shall be all in black.’ She searched in the pocket of her gown, drew out a pair of black lace mittens, put them on with the stoniest and steadiest composure, and then quietly crossed her hands in her lap.

(incidentally, it took me ages to track down this remembered scene, because I was searching for gloves rather than mittens…)

Of course her slate-coloured mittens would have counted as semi-bereavement wear according to the shopwalker in the GB Stern quote above.

More?

• -      In PatriciaWentworth’s The Ivory Dagger, with a houseparty of death, a suitcase of clothes has to be brought from London because one of the guests has no black clothes with her. Strict planning is necessary: ‘only do make sure that Robbins has put in the white crêpe-de-Chine blouse and not the shell-pink. And the black wool dress with high neck and long sleeves. It will do for afternoon or evening. I don’t suppose we shall dress, but one can’t sit about in a coat and skirt all day.’

• -      There is a splendid collection of hideous mourning brooches in this entry on Mrs Oliphant’s Phoebe, Junior.
• -      A young woman is forced to wear a very old-fashioned coat to a funeral in Hilda Lawrence’s The Deadly Pavilion – I used this picture from the Library of Congress:

I haven’t even listed all the references to mourning on the blog – see also Lolly Willowes in an unbecoming black hat ‘Mourning was never satisfactory if one bought it in a country town’. And an obscure book by Rosemary Kutak where ‘Ione’s going into the village to see if she can find a black dress to wear to the inquest.’ It was this item that inspired me to start collecting quotes on mourning.

Thou Shell of Death byNicholas Blake: this from the blogpost

There is the beautiful but cold-hearted Lucilla, who is in mourning and…

…had conjured up from somewhere a dress that conveyed a suggestion of widow’s weeds and at the same time was an invitation to all comers.

Obviously here at Clothes in Books we had no interest in illustrating THAT – nah, just kidding. Take a look at the top of the entry.

There is so much to say there is going to have to be a second entry...