While pictures famously paint a thousand words, the reverse is also true, and a few well-chosen words can evoke vivid images. Essie Summers was a very visual writer who showed by telling. The reader notices the clothes and who wears what. Summers is also often explicit about the psychology of appearance, sometimes in dialogue within the context of the drapery industry. The word cloud representing the language used around dress and textiles in a sample of her novels highlights the prominence of colour foremost, and fabric close behind (Figure 1).
It only takes reading a few of her books to conclude that the author might have had green eyes; she confirms this in her autobiography (Summers, 1974). Green ensembles abound, with several green or green and black suits and trouser suits. In her early novels, clothes are generic, in line with a convention recognising how too-specific fashion can date fiction. A green cotton skirt and light blouse with a scarlet cardigan could be from any time from the early sixties onwards, but Summers became more detailed as her confidence as a writer grew. (92)
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As the years proceed, the colour palette changes and styles become more detailed. (93)
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Where in the early novels there’s a degree of impressionism about the basics of colour and shape, these later outfits are more fully visualised for us.
It’s also noticeable that in the early years, the brightly coloured heroine contrasts with the colours worn by both the vamps who cause trouble and the heroes. A typical femme fatale wears a slinky number with a black satin skirt and a shadow-printed leopard spotted top. While not all the books have the simple but obvious contrast of the wholesome vs glam, it’s marked when it does happen. (93)
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Summers uses colour on three levels. The cheerful, strong colours reflect her own cheerful disposition in her characters, while drawing the eye to the character as the positive central force within the novel. The changes in tone echo the changes in fashion colours through the decades, revealing a writer attuned to her society and becoming more confident about making the work contemporary as it depicts society and fashion changes. (94)
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The novels also prove a source of potentially lost information about the drapery business. High Country Governess begins with discussions about triple-banked haberdashery shelves, departmental positioning for traffic and its result on sales, the right light and temperature needed for the cosmetics department. (94)
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Over the course of her three decades or so writing for Mills & Boon, Essie Summers conducted conversations with herself and her readers about love, family, society. Through dialogue, characters explore their changing world. As the world changes, so does what she writes about and how she writes about it. To a literary scholar like the late Lawrence Jones, the novels can be “of extreme historic value because they tell quite a bit about a certain layer of society” (Munro, 2018), which is accurate to a degree. The “layer of society” in question is that of an author who was genuinely working class, largely self-educated. It is also a particular female layer that more serious local writers of the time knew nothing about. Dress and material culture are key aspects of this in Summers’s work, and reading through the transitions takes us through 30 years, even if she is increasingly out of touch with modern romance and its style by the time she signed off from Mills & Boon in the 1980s. (95)
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