The history of rainwear

Early 20th C literature

There are many references in the Diary & Letters of that inveterate cyclist and walker Virginia Woolf, always sensitive to the weather – Virginia leaving her macintosh in a hedge before a walk and getting caught in a downpour; Virginia and Vanessa walking in their macintoshes; Virginia meeting Rebecca West who was wearing a macintosh; Virginia asking Vita Sackville-West to return a pink macintosh she’d left behind on a visit; Virginia courting splashing waves in a storm….

Katherine Mansfield’s letters to J Middleton Murry: standing at an open window in a great storm of wind and rain at night in her macintosh.

Attitudes to the macintosh are ambivalent – on the one hand practical country wear, on the other dowdy and déclassé as town wear. See V Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’, in which Clarissa Dalloway scorns Miss Kilman, because she – and there are other reasons -- always wears a green macintosh.

Somewhere too, vaguely remembered, in one of Richard Aldington’s novels a similar attitude.

Also ‘macintosh’ was, usually, a generic term for rainwear, not specific to what material it was made of, e.g. the several references in Iris Murdoch’s ‘An Unofficial Rose’.

Tony

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Kingsley Amis' I want it now has Simon wearing a riding mac and taking it off - right at the end of the book.

'The door opened and Simon, wearing a white riding-mack, got out and stood facing Ronnie....

"Look, if you want to take your mack off you'll have to leave go of me for just a second. I'll still be here."

Simon turned out to be wearing a knitted white Chanel suit ...'

Kingsley Amis, I Want It Now, Panther edition, London, 1969, Panther Books, p.200-1.

H.