In conversation with Melissa Fagan

Dressing the Dearloves

Sat 8 Sep 2018

Kelly Doust

Auditorium 2, State Library of Queensland

Fashion / Home/Family/Childhood

324

#Performances

#About the event

Duration: 60 minutes

About Dressing the Dearloves by Kelly Doust

One crumbling grand manor house, a family in decline, five generations of women, and an attic full of beautiful clothes with secrets and lies hidden in their folds. Kelly Doust, author of Precious Things, spins another warm, glamorous and romantic mystery of secrets, love, fashion, families - and how we have to trust in ourselves, even in our darkest of days. One for lovers of Kate Morton, Belinda Alexandra, Fiona McIntosh and Lucy Foley.

Failed fashion designer Sylvie Dearlove is coming home to England - broke, ashamed and in disgrace - only to be told her parents are finally selling their once-grand, now crumbling country house, Bledesford, the ancestral home of the Dearlove family for countless generations.

Sylvie has spent her whole life trying to escape being a Dearlove, and the pressure of belonging to a family of such headstrong, charismatic and successful women. Beset by self-doubt, she starts helping her parents prepare Bledesford for sale, when she finds in a forgotten attic a thrilling cache of old steamer trunks and tea chests full of elaborate dresses and accessories acquired from across the globe by five generations of fashionable Dearlove women. Sifting through the past, she also stumbles across a secret which has been hidden - in plain sight - for decades, a secret that will change the way she thinks about herself, her family, and her future.

Romantic, warm, and glamorous, moving from Edwardian England to the London Blitz to present day London, Dressing the Dearloves is a story of corrosiveness of family secrets, the insecurities that can sabotage our best efforts, and the seductive power of dressing up.

Presented by The University of Queensland

#Artist

Kelly Doust

Since 2009, Kelly Doust has published five non-fiction books about craft and fashion: The Crafty Minx, The Crafty Kid, A Life in Frocks: A Memoir, Minxy Vintage (all Murdoch Books) The Crafty Minx At Home (HarperCollins). She has a background in book publishing and publicity, and has worked in the UK, Hong Kong and Australia and freelanced for magazines such as Vogue, Australian Women’s Weekly and Sunday Life Magazine.

She currently lives in Sydney, Australia with her husband and daughter.

#Moderator

Melissa Fagan

Melissa Fagan is the author of a memoir, What Will Be Worn: A McWhirters Story, and a freelance writer and editor, currently based in Coolangatta, in Yugambeh–Bundjalung country, on the border of Queensland and New South Wales. Her fiction and nonfiction has been published in Overland, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, QWeekend and others. She also teaches and lectures in creative writing courses at a number of universities. At various times throughout her life (but mostly pre-21st century) she has worked as a receptionist, data entry clerk, call centre operator, market research interviewer and editorial assistant. She has also taught swimming and horse-riding, and led tours through South East Asia. In 2018 she started a practice-led PhD in travel writing with Curtin University and the University of Aberdeen.