Return of the Corset and the Hourglass Ideal in Regency England
Poets involved
What happened
With the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the consolidation of Regency society in London, the boned corset returned to dominance in British women's fashion, now producing a newly exaggerated hourglass silhouette with a defined waist and rounded hips. Manufacturers began producing corsets with metal eyelets and laces that could produce significantly tighter closure than before. This period saw tight-lacing become a widespread, if contested, social practice among women of the middle and upper classes throughout England.
Literary impact
The Regency and early Victorian period was the great age of female poetry and prose writing — Jane Austen, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.), and others worked within a social world defined by the corseted, decorous female body they both inhabited and scrutinised. Hemans's poetry in particular engaged with the tensions between domestic ideals and interior feeling, tensions directly embodied in the corset's external compression of inner life. The corset became an emblem of the 'proper lady' that women writers both performed and quietly resisted.
Source: Wikipedia
