The history of the raincoat

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