“My mother has ordered a new bonnet, and so have I.

“My mother has ordered a new bonnet, and so have I; both white strip, trimmed with white ribbon” Jane Austen, Letter to Cassandra, May 1801.
The first Easter bonnets were spring bonnets. They must have felt wonderful to wear after the restrictions of Lent and the gloomy clothes of winter.
Eleanor Houghton, a practicing milliner and Regency dress expert, has made two bonnets for Chawton house Library to commemorate the bicentenary of the publications of Pride and Prejudice and... Mansfield Park. One of the images below shows the ‘1813 Lydia Bennet Bonnet’, which we use to illustrate Regency-period clothing for our school groups. The other, the 1814 Maria Rushworth bonnet, was auctioned to raise funds for our charity at the Jane Austen Society of North America meeting in Montreal in 2014. The historically accurate headdress took over sixty hours of labour, twenty five metres of natural straw plait and ninety metres of cotton thread to make. Read Eleanor’s fascinating blog post from last year here:

http://www.chawtonhouse.org/…
Eleanor will be returning to Chawton House Library this summer on 24th June during Regency week to give an evening talk on clothing in the time of Jane Austen. Tickets will soon be available to buy via our website.