Linda Grant, author of the Man Booker Prize“nominated 2008 novel The Clothes on Their Backs, knows the importance of sartorial style in creating a fictional character. On The Economist‘s More Intelligent Life website, Grant writes about authors who pay close attention to the things their characters get decked out in, going as far back as William Langland’s allegory Piers Ploughman, and name-checking several other authors who knew that in a fictional context, the clothes make the (wo)man:

In Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence’s insistence on Gudrun’s coloured stockings is a screaming reminder of his rage at her sexual liberation. In almost all of Jean Rhys’s novels the hunger for fashion and for new clothes, the shame of threadbare underwear, saturates the soul of her alienated female characters. Audrey Hepburn may get all the credit for the LBD-and-pearls look in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but it was Truman Capote who clothed his Holly Golightly in a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker.

Grant goes on to isolate what she believes to be the three best-dressed characters in literature: Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch; the Duchesse de Guermantes in Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu; and the titular hero(ine) in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.