‘It is the Hat that Matters the Most’: Hats, Propriety and Fashion in British Fiction, 1890–1930

Essential to both propriety and fashion, hats were a crucial aspect of British female dress and appearance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article shows how British novelists of this period, ranging from mainstream to experimental, understood this importance. With appropriate contextualization, these literary depictions can illuminate how women wore and felt about their hats. Authors such as Frances Hodgson Burnett, Dorothy Whipple, and Virginia Woolf used these accessories to explore social respectability and convention, the pleasures and challenges of following fashion, and consumption strategies among women. Despite the era’s significant social changes, remarkable continuity exists in these literary representations of hats.