Sometimes only an art exhibition catalog or a social history of women in Georgian England will do the trick. Below is a list of books that I had to read!
Eighteenth-Century History:
Amanda Vickery, A Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England
Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England
Fashion:
Valerie Steele, Patricia Mears, Isabel Toledo: Fashion From the Inside Out
Patricia Mears, American Beauty: Aesthetics and Innovation in Fashion
[Various curators] Impressionism, Fashion, & Modernity
Nathalie Herschdorfer, Coming into Fashion: A Century of Photography at Conde Nast
Henry Green:
Loving, Living, and Party Going
Nothing
Ballet:
Patricia Hofmans, Apollo's Angels: a History of Ballet
Stephen Manes, Where Snowflakes Dance and Swear: Inside the Land of Ballet
Jane Pritchard, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929: When Art Danced with Music
Richard Buckle, Nijinsky: A Life of Genius and Madness
Christina Ezrabi, Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia
Background for Proust:
Richard Davenport-Hines, A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922
History of Science:
Howard Markel, An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine
Jean Rhys:
Lilian Pizzichini, The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys
Junot Diaz:
Drown
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
This is How You Lose Her
Austro-Hungarian Empire:
Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
Norman Stone, Europe Transformed, 1878-1919
Servants:
Frederick John Gorst, Of Carriages and Kings
William d'Arfey, Curious Relations
Margaret Powell, Below Stairs
Jo Baker, Longbourn
