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Catherine Morland’s “Plain Black Shoes”: Practical Fashions and Buried Convents in Northanger Abbey

Abstract This article considers Catherine Morland’s “plain black shoes” and the obscure history of the Abbey estate in Northanger Abbey (1818), as they each contain surfaces that, if not read with the language of fashion in mind, appear to be unassumingly “plain” and without any material depth. I focus on narratives of ornamentation and practicality as they appear in both the material history of fashionable footwear and in the depiction of the ruined and suppressed nunnery in order to argue that Austen’s novel uses both sites to complicate a single reading of women’s histories and identities and to comment on how the language of fashion constructs femininity.