#I'd look a lot more victorian era than I am but like. it feels very classic ghost outfit

[lyra-swan]

Books I've read in 2024 that I recommend:

I've read 24 books this year, which is the most I've read since I was a kid binging Warrior Cats and Enid Blyton's series, usually I'd struggle to finish one book within a year, but I got a library card this year and ended up checking out more books than I'd expected. Anyway, I wanted to make a post with my favourite reads and recommend them as a way to celebrate me being able to read so much for the first time in a long time. Big thank you to my library for all the LGBT books it keeps in stock, otherwise I would've been too bored to continue reading. The links all lead to the books' goodreads pages.

Tipping The Velvet, Sarah Waters

5/5 stars! Finished this one in December and I loved it to death! I just happened to see it on goodreads in the recommended section of another book I was looking at and I'm glad I saw it, and especially that my library had a beautiful hardcover on its shelf. It's a rags to riches, to rags to riches, then rags again story and it's a lot of fun seeing where the protagonist will end up next in a later Victorian era London. The writing is excellent, and I loved the whole cross-dressing theme in the book, especially when Nancy decides to pretend to 'be a boy' and trick gay men into believing she is one 'for a pound a suck'. The moment Kitty was introduced, on the stage as a male impersonator in a suit, I was in love with the book. I couldn't recommend this enough and if you like cross-dressing girls and tragic lesbian romances then give this a shot.

The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass

5/5 stars. This was the first book I checked out from the library this year once I updated my library card from the children's section. For a short description: it's about an insane little pervert midget who pretends to be three for the remainder of his life after turning three, and is obsessed with tin drums and nurses. It's hilarious, shocking, sometimes disgusting, and I loved the way the author wrote Oskar. My favourite aspects of his characterisation is how he chides himself for, I won't be specific for spoilers, some of the bad things he does, but as a reader I got the feeling he doesn't actually care that much, like it doesn't seem to deeply trouble him, yet somehow does, yet somehow doesn't, god he's a complicated character and I love the writing to bits. He grows up during the growth of the Nazi party and eventually, WW2, then everything afterwards, and it's such a unique perspective seeing it through this insane midget's eyes. Always the narrator (Oskar, from his bed in a mental facility) switches between first and third person, but it was done very smoothly and was just icing on the cake for me. I've spilt a full glass of wine while writing this and I'm very upset over the loss.

A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood

5/5 stars. This is my favourite novel by Christopher, having read Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin after The Tin Drum. I watched the movie this month and while I thought it was a pretty good adaptation, I love the book more. Had I known I'd be writing this post I'd love to have written more notes for this to better put into words what exactly I loved about this book. Christopher knocked it out the park with this one, and in 1964 when E. M. Forster was still hiding Maurice, which I also read and am extremely thankful was eventually published.

Dancer from the Dance, Andrew Holleran

5/5 stars. I will need to re-read this one, I unfortunately had things going on and I was too focused on those happenings to really pay attention. But when I was able to focus on reading, I loved it a lot. It takes place in the gay scene of 1970's New York and has such a sad tone right from the first chapter, something I'm a sucker for when done right (and here it is done perfectly), but it also made me smile plenty of times. The main character's need to be liked was relatable in a way for me, and the queen Sutherland who helps him through his new life was my favourite character in the novel. (There's a Sutherland Security in my country and I always thought of the character when I saw a sign for the company while knocking on doors delivering pizza). The depiction of the setting, and the surroundings Malone finds himself in was done beautifully.

The Island of Dr. Moreau, H. G. Wells

5/5 stars. This one wasn't actually a library book, I found it by chance while I was visiting the local second-hand bookstore for a copy of any books that I wanted to read but weren't at the library. It must have been calling to me from where it sat on its shelf by the front desk, because now it's one of my favourites. If you know me then you know that I love, LOVE evil doctors who do unethical experiments, so of course I was instantly captivated by Dr. Moreau himself who was shunned by society for his own experiments, and continued to do them on an island away from society's eyes. The creatures on the island were written terrifyingly. Loved it - the tension of the protagonist exploring the island at night, even in the day, and of course I loved the doctor. Hurrah for evil doctors!

Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu

4/5 stars. This was the first proper vampire novel I have ever read in my life, and I'm glad for it. There was a certain eeriness to it, and though I could already guess the identity of the vampire and make out what was going on, it didn't diminish that eerie quality. I never thought a vampire novel could have that effect on me! I have to wonder what the first readers back in 1872 thought of it if this is how I felt despite all the pop culture surrounding vampires here in 2024. Also, the very reason I decided to read this: the Sapphic undertones in every interaction between Laura and Carmilla. *Chef's kiss*. It's not explicitly lesbian but it's definitely worth a mention. I suppose my one complaint would be how, many, commas, there were, in each sentence, but I got used to it.

Seducing the Sedgwicks Series, Cat Sebastian

4.5/5 stars. Again so thankful to my library for stocking a variety of LGBT books, from tragic types like Dancer from the Dance to comfiness like these. I still haven't read the third one, but I intend to and am excited to because the first two were so good! So far the second book is my favourite of this series, the main characters just being a perfect mesh for each other. I always thought those Victorian romances with their silly covers were silly, but I guess if it's gay I actually like them. (Or lesbian, in fact I ended up buying Cat's A Little Light Mischief because of how I enjoyed reading her work in this series.)

The Jasmine Throne, Tasha Suri

4/5 stars. This was the first lesbian novel I have ever read, thanks library! I have to admit that at the start I thought I might not enjoy it after all, but the world was interesting and I really wanted to see how things would go between the girls Malini and Priya, so I kept reading and ended up liking it more than I thought. I was really disappointed seeing my library didn't have the next two books - until not too long ago! My library has now acquired them and I feel very lucky and thankful.

Other books I read, loved, and recommend:

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (beautifully written, bought and started reading last year, finished this year)

The Captive Prince series by C. S. Pacat (SO fun)

Maurice by E. M. Forster

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Animal Farm by George Orwell (it's always relevant, isn't it? When Snowball was being blamed for everything that went wrong on the farm, it sounded eerily similar...)

Night by Elie Wiesel (should be read by everyone)

The year isn't over so I might yet finish a few more books, I have Annie on My Mind and Late Bloomer sitting on my bedside drawers. I hope I can continue reading next year though I might be busy since I'll be starting study. Either way I feel a bit proud of myself for being able to read so much for the first time in ages, all thanks to my library. I'm blessed that New Zealand can't be half-bothered 'cracking down' on LGBT books in the libraries, so that I and everyone else can have free access to these books. Of course, I could pirate when I'm out of money, but where's the fun in that? I love holding the books in my hands and smelling their pages like some kind of freak.

[decepti-thots]

sorry if you've answered this somewhere already - out of the books you've read this year, which three did you enjoy the most? and out of the fics you've read this year, which three did you enjoy the most?

All the fics I loved this year I mostly recced as and when on my fic recs tag, and tbh I don't think I read enough TF fic this year to really sort them into a top three- if I loved it, I put it up somewhere, mostly. If I had to pluck three out, I'd say Red Gold (god tier Rodimus characterisation), Your Own Hands (a reread, but still my favourite taraprowl fic, it gets the nod) and... oh actually. Okay, this one isn't Transformers, but I have to give a shout out to this Lupin III interactive fiction Twine fic that is an INCREDIBLE use of form to do something very ambitious with a fic. It's so good! If I do have any even casual Lupin enjoyers following me, definitely take a look.

The books, discounting one I already recommended:

Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic, translated by Sophus Helle, is probably the single best book I read this year. I love the Epic of Gilgamesh very much, and this is a lovely translation, but what tipped it over for me was his essays after the poem where he discusses it in a way that is both accessible and also gets into the finer points of how to approach and appreciate the poem in a wider context. His discussion of the way gender plays into the power structures of the poem and the overview he gives of contemporary Iraqi cultural reaction to the poem were especially interesting. Especially after the former, I am really excited to read his book published this year translating and discussing all the poems of Enheduanna! Highly recommended. God I love Gilgamesh.

I reread The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard, a play set in the Victorian era based (very loosely) around the life, death and afterlife of A. E. Housman. It's a really dense play on a lot of levels, mostly well known for being really obtuse. It has about six deeply obscure references to classical scholarship per sentence, twice as many offhand references to Victorian Oxbridge Stuff that go unremarked on, the timeline constantly jumps back and forth, a meaningful chunk of it is a dead guy talking to his younger self on the Styx, and they spend most of that time discussing the minutiae of latin grammar in poetry (with absolutely no dumbing down for the audience) as a metaphor for their unrequited yearning. I believe when it premiered on Broadway, they basically had to provide a book of like. Explanations as to what the fuck every other conversation was referencing. But I love it, even though I understand maybe fifty percent of it, because it's so beautifully written and clever and funny and able to withdraw from the ever-present threat of sentimentality. One of my favourite plays of all time. The 'poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship' exchange gets me every time. On my knees begging for a fucking proshot to be made of a performance one day.

A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames by Brendan Keogh is my favourite nonfiction by a narrow margin. It's a book that outlines a way to approach analysis and criticism of video games through a phenomenological framework, and it made me completely re-think how I understand what the 'text' of a video game is. This one is very much a work of academia, though it does give a lot more overview of what phenomenology is than, say, the average philosophy text is likely to, since it sits more in the 'games studies' area where that's not taken as much for granted, so it's not totally inaccessible. It made me think a lot about how video games exist as a unique medium in ways that completely diverge from the standard narrative of 'videogames are unique due to interactivity'. It takes a lot for me to be impressed by writing about games, given just how much of it I read/have read, but Keogh never disappoints.

[grandhotelabyss]

Rearranging my bookshelves at the moment in chronological order. One thing I noticed is that after Austen... English literature kinda fizzled out. At least until the early 1890s when a whole pile of writers emerge all at once (Wilde, Yeats, Shaw, Stevenson, Conrad, Doyle, Hardy, H. G. Welles, and more; and almost immediately they're followed by a tidal wave of modernists). Whereas for seventy years, aside from the three big poets you're covering plus Alice In Wonderland, it's just Dickens, Eliot, and the Brontes!

Now, admittedly the 'just' is doing some heavy lifting — but so are those novelists, in carrying Shakespeare's language over a seventy-ish year period! And in terms of variety, they feel like both a less *diverse* ('sprawling 18C three-deckers' describes accurately, if dismissively, most of those novels) and, more controversially, a less *fruitful* crop than the bursting quarter-century from Blake's first illuminated manuscripts to Austen's death.

Now you did discuss the 'cultural studies' aspect of the Victorian era, which was very enlightening — but at the same time, Russian, French, and American literature each undergo what are almost certainly their greatest periods! Which makes sense to me considering the *imaginative* ferment I'd expect to be cause by the political and industrial revolutions of the entire period... like, those three countries didn't reduce to cultural studies!

So, three questions: 1) Who am I missing over that stretch from Austen's death to, let's say, Dorian Gray? 2) Do you think this reading is correct, or am I weighting things wrongly, either being too dismissive of the writers named, or giving too much credit to the writers at either end of the century? 3) What, if you can answer something so broad, was different in France, America and Russia?

(Sorry to set you a three-part essay question on a Wednesday night lmao, really I'm just fishing for any interesting thoughts you might have)

If I were to dispute your claim, I would do so in two ways: 1. I'd say that Dickens is so enormous, so much the iconic and canonical English novelist, the one who stands next to Shakespeare, that he carries the whole period; and 2. I'd say (and have already said in The Invisible College) that the Victorian Sage writers like Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold have the weight and intensity of the prior Romantic poets and subsequent modernists.

If someone else were to dispute your claim, someone else might say that there are a lot of great novelists in the mid-Victorian period, like Trollope, Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, and Wilkie Collins. Someone else might say this, but I could never get interested in those writers, and I doubt anyone thinks they're the equal of Balzac, Melville, or Tolstoy—or of Dickens. On the other hand, we now take the Brontës far more seriously than people once did—I would put them essentially on the same level as Austen and Dickens—so fashions in these things are always changing.

So I essentially agree with you that, except for the writers you name, especially Dickens and Eliot, it's a fairly flat period. I suspect the reasons are the ones the modernists would have offered, despite their sometimes exaggerated animus against the Victorians: the sentimentalism, the censoriousness, the middle-class piety, the imperial self-regard, the padded serials, and all the rest of it.

I've quoted on here before Seamus Deane's slightly offensive view of the matter in his Celtic Revivals, coming from Marxist postcolonial theory (and as I've also said before, this is particularly unfair to George Eliot, who, I must emphasize, translated Spinoza):

It is, I believe, easier to understand Joyce’s achievement in this respect by looking to the Continental tradition of the novel. There the theme of intellectual vocation was much more deeply rooted and was treated with a subtlety quite foreign to the evangelical, female puritan spirit which so dominated the sentimental English novel. Perhaps Middlemarch more than any other single work shows how the innate provincialism of the English novel deprived it of a consciousness of itself as a part of a greater European culture. This is something conspicuously present in the French and, even more, in the Russian novel of the nineteenth century. One could not imagine Crime and Punishment or Le Rouge et le Noir without the idea of Europe, especially Christian Europe, as a living force in them, in their traditions, and in the minds of their creators. But Emma and Great Expectations and Middlemarch survive happily, and more modestly, apart from that idea. Not until an American, Henry James, arrived on the scene was the novel in English Europeanized, and the Irishman Joyce countered this achievement by anglicizing the European novel.

So that "puritan" and "provincial" spirit explains the disparity between the English on the one hand and the Russians and French on the other, who were simply writing in different social circumstances for an audience presumed to contain fewer young ladies in need of moral protection. One might add the English empirical bias against big ideas, which authors as different as Blake and Eliot would so strongly protest.

In Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler says the European novelists held together an audience that consisted of common readers, mostly female, on the one hand, and highbrow intellectuals, mostly male, on the other. The Anglo novelist, by contrast, somehow let this audience fragment early on and had to address either one set of readers or the other.

The American case is particularly instructive: Hawthorne and Melville were neglected in their time, relegated to the margin by popular novels written in "the evangelical, female puritan spirit," of which Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most famous—but we just don't read these books! We read The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick instead of The Lamplighter or The Wide, Wide World. It's as if the English Victorian canon had been reduced to Sartor Resartus and Wuthering Heights. This causes the historicist critic to despair, and obviously a certain type of feminist critic too, who especially resents Hawthorne's line about "the damned mob of scribbling women," but what we can we do? We're interested in what we're interested in. And as I said in one of the IC episodes, it's not as if the great female writers of the 20th century wanted to follow in Stowe's footsteps either, since the puritan and provincial spirit was a much a prison for female authors in the 19th century as it was their place (their only permissible place) of articulation.

[geeoharee]

tagged by @cackled0g

1.) Are you named after anyone? An actress, and my grandfather, in that order. I don't have any feelings either way about the actress, but I loved my grandfather very much, so that's all right.

2.) When was the last time you cried? Oh god I cry most days. It's just how I'm put together. Some autistics meltdown and smash stuff, some scream and shout, I start weeping. My dad used to say I was filled up with tears more than most people, so that they were very near to overflowing.

3.) Do you have kids? Nooooo. I used to say "No, I'm gay" but I have now been sufficiently lectured by gay people who have kids. So: no, AND, I'm gay.

4.) Do you use sarcasm a lot? I suppose I do, yes. I'm just trying to match the energy in the room, usually. Often I get it wrong. I think I'm funny, people often laugh at the wrong bits though.

5.) What sports do you play/have played? I am not a sporting type. I struggle with my hand-eye coordination and my balance. But when I was a little girl I took riding lessons, I'd love to do that again. Gotta get back in shape first. (It's not fair on the horse otherwise, you know.)

6.) What’s the first thing you notice about people? Errrrr... I'm meant to notice things?

7.) What’s your eye color? Hazel, I suppose. They were blue when I was born, they're sort of mostly brown now.

8.) Scary movies or happy endings? Both! I like stories! I like satisfying stories: that can mean everyone gets eaten by the zombies, or the couple ride off into the sunset, either's great if it's done well.

9.) Any special talents? I won a prize at school for Electronics. I was very neat with the soldering iron, and circuit design is just prop logic. I adore prop logic, it turns out.

10.) Where were you born? Hill country. At regular intervals I have to go for a walk and look at some grass and dry stone walls and sheep. It resets me and gets my shoulders down from around my ears.

11.) What are your hobbies? I'm currently in a terrible cycle of getting addicted to one video game at a time. I finished Autonauts, and now I'm playing Red Dead Redemption 2. When I can drag myself away from my desk I knit (quite well) and play piano (badly). Oh, and go for walks.

12.) Do you have any pets? Sadly at the moment I live in a terrible beige flat owned by a terrible beige letting company, so no. We always had dogs growing up. I'd like a dog.

13.) How tall are you? 5'10" and mostly legs. I have to buy Long in men's trousers and in most shops I can't buy women's at all.

14.) Favorite subject in school? Maths. Like, by quite a large margin. I am excessively jealous of Mycroft Holmes who has found a way to sit in a room and do sums for the rest of his natural life. They spoiled it after the Victorian era by inventing computers, so now I have to program bloody computers instead. This is very cruel to rocks.

15.) Dream job? Well, if you'd asked me when I was 12, I'd have said programming computers. This is unfortunately what happens when you get what you want. But if I wasn't so concerned about saving for retirement, I'd be volunteering for the local Footpaths Society, harassing farmers for putting up barbed wire where they shouldn't.

Tagging: @skyriderwednesday @s-l-martin @jesidres (only if you like tag games)

[love-you-i-think]

week three: do you believe in love at first sight?

(posting this late, but its fine, nobody talk to me, i'm new at this)

sources referenced at the end of the post, btw!

not to be a pessimist (even though i literally am a pessimist, whoops), but i don't believe in the concept of love at first sight. for me, it feels more akin to a fairy tale or simply a fiction trope. hear me out-- the reality is when you allegedly "fall in love at first sight" you're making a whole ton of assumptions on that person's character. you've only just seen them, nothing else, so sure, maybe you love their face? but you certainly don't love them as a person, you don't know anything about them yet!

that isn't to say you can't have chemistry with someone right off the bat, after "first sight." i just don't think you can qualify it as a true form of love. it's chemistry, interest in each other, a potential for loving later on. this is why missed connections/posts about missed connections are so compelling: the potential for a relationship. there is no love yet in those connections! meghanne barker's article on these kind of posts emphasizes this potential, idenitfying them as a "call out for intimacy" and "erotic potential." fiction that uses the trope of love at first sight take this erotic potential and turn it into a story of actual love and relationships. but in real life? more often than not, missed connections or potential for love falls through one way or another. posting a missed connection online, even in web 1.0 when the internet was a smaller place, was like putting a message in a bottle and simply hoping it reaches the right person. spoiler: it usually doesn't! the internet is so, so big, even more so now!!

it makes a lot of sense why the idea is so damn popular, though. finding love is hard, and always has been hard. (the concept can be traced as far back as the victorian era given our readings, but much earlier i'm sure). so, people fantasize about it being easy, knowing right away that someone is the one, because imagine how nice that would be! instead of having to date and get hurt multiple times looking for the love of your life, or whatever you dream of romantically.

(spoilers for closer (2004) beyond this point! it's been over 10 years though so like... lol)

i don't want to completely dismiss the concept altogether, don't get me wrong. i love it as a trope in fiction! like i said, it's almost a fairy tale to me. like in closer, in the beginning when dan sees alice for the first time: everything slows down and goes in slow-motion as dan apparently falls in love with her. classic love-at-first-sight-moment!

and in some media, the relationship goes really well and they truly are soulmates, or whatever. they live the rest of their lives together in true love, like a fairy tale! that's not the kind of movie that closer is, though, unfortunately. (hence why i said dan apparently falls in love with her, yikes.)

honestly, i feel like closer just uses this trope as a hook, only to pull the rug out from under you very quickly afterwards. pulling from the article on victorian heterosexuality, the trope is clearly used to simply accelerate the intimacy between our first two main characters, alice and dan. because it is made abundantly clear that dan is a huuuge cheater from the first interaction with anna--he is bound to hurt alice. and it just goes all downhill from there!

the film really made me think mostly about the toxicity that is so easy to fall into with monogamy relationship culture. because my first thought was "this would all be solved if they just had a polycule." but the reality is No, it wouldn't. these people are so incredibly toxic in their concept of monogamous love, their polygamous concept would likely be just as bad. i'd argue that these characters don't even really seem in love with each other. there was some old tumblr post i had saw about toxic monogamy culture and the first point was "the normalization of jealousy as an indicator of love" and that immediately made me think of closer. it's just jealousy and jealousy and no real love.

also, just because you're in a committed closed relationship doesn't mean you stop being attracted to other people, as we so, so clearly see with closer. but, obviously, cheating is still SO wrong! dan has negative self-control, i swear. not everything has to be acted on!! (this film just consistently pissed me off, i'm being so real with you right now.)

stepping away from the film a bit and looking at the readings we did, i found christopher matthew's article on victorian heterosexuality and love at first sight interesting, as he starts by arguing that 21st century culture places love at first sight in a feminine sphere. he goes on to say it originated as a masculine idea in the victorian times. sure... this is plausible. i thought it was an interesting argument, given the film feels very male-centered (even though it's 2 guys 2 girls, even numbers, still manages to do that!). something something the writer is clearly a man and sees women as things to move the plot along. so i definitely feel like the idea of love at first sight being a feminine concept is... iffy at best? also, why are we even giving tropes or concepts gendered vibes or something, anyway? it just felt like... unnecessary. i mean, i see where he is coming from, but like still feels weird and eugh. he did certainly make a lot of great points, regardless, and calls mid-century portrayals of the concept "spectacle[s] of male heterosexual desire," which i think closer can fall under, too, backing up my point that it is male-centered.

anyways, only watch closer if you want to be pissed the hell off, and love at first sight is a fiction trope and nothing more. sorry!

this week's sources:

Closer (dir. Mike Nichols, U.S., 2004)

Charles Baudelaire, “A un pasant” (To a Passerby), Les fleurs du mal - poem.

Meghanne Barker, “You Have Been Misconnected,” Critical Inquiry 50, no. 2 (2024): 201-224

Christopher Matthews, “Love at First Sight: The Velocity of Victorian Heterosexuality,” Victorian Studies 46, no. 3 (2004): 425-454.

[shi-away]

that's so cool! i love the hat especially. you're so creative. this isn't a question so much as invitation to infodump about historical fashion (or anything really!) - 🪴

thank you! tldr included because hooh boy when i infodump i sure do infodump. TL;DR: this made me realize I'd probably enjoy being a historian, museums are cool, secret pants supremacy, and according to one dressmaker guide, women should not have a pocket less than 14 inches long and eight inches wide.

I've loved history since I was little. I used to visit the state museum almost every week till I was around eight. I would always love looking at the diorama exhibits, it helped me feel less divorced from the people who lived long ago. I especially loved the children's area, where you could touch animal bones and furs, work on a fake archaeology site, and look at bugs under a microscope! I've also visited some historical re-enactment sites and villages, and they were almost magical to me. I'd love to be a re-enactor one day, but I don't know if I'd want it to be a long-term job. Around the beginning of last summer, I discovered historical fashion, and it was like my love of history had been reborn. The late Victorian to early Edwardian era immediately became my favorite because of its silhouette. I started watching a lot of dress historians on youtube, especially Bernadette Banner. I was also beginning to define my own personal style, so this new information hit me at the perfect time. The Victorian era lasts a long time in history, so you can imagine many different styles when you think of "victorian fashion" you could be thinking of bustles, hoop skirts, or long trains, all victorian women's fashion! By the victorian era, men's fashion was really boring and stayed relatively similar through the decades. Small changes would take place, but those changes were much harder to spot. While I love a nice Edwardian men's suit, I know more about women's fashion than I do men's. Clothes back in the day were outrageously expensive even for the wealthy. You needed to acquire fine imported fabrics and silks if you were a lady of high society, and silk was so expensive that wealthy ladies would shamelessly wear pieced garments (where a panel of clothing is constructed from several scraps sewn together instead of one singular panel to conserve fabric) Women would re-wear dresses as long as they could, having the same gowns remade into the latest fashions rather than commissioning new ones. Besides getting their dresses reworked, there would often be new undergarments for each new silhouette, with the iconic Gibson girl figure sometimes faked by padding, ruffles, or entire boned undergarments designed to be worn along with one's corset. Even models of the time would doctor their photos to make their waists look impossibly small. Fun fact: the popular late Victorian silhouette was defined as a ratio that could be achieved through any means one might think of, including all of the aforementioned methods. With the Edwardian era came the bicycle, and particularly the acceptance of women riding bicycles and participating in sports. special sports corsets were produced, and while cycling became immensely popular, wearing trousers or pants was frowned upon by ladies of society. Attempting to bicycle in a skirt proved to be a dangerous and deadly task for women, so the split skirt was invented. The split skirt is essentially a baggy pair of pants that could be passed off as a skirt to the rest of the world. Some had button-down panels in the front that concealed the crease in the front of the skirt, but others left the front buttonless. I am a believer in split-skirt supremacy, the only other garments that come close to beating my love of split skirts are waistcoats and ulster jackets (aka Inverness coats) I think this is where I'm going to stop, mainly because I'm running out of coherent thoughts but I very much love historical fashion, and tbh I would love for my future job to be thinking about history all the time