Northanger Abbey Cosplay Pinup: Catherine Morland does…Catherine Morland

Hurray, another nifty Retro Lovely cover photographed by Marilee Caruso Photography (who also did the makeup and hair)! This time, it’s in Retro Lovely’s cosplay title, Masquerade No. 26!

You can grab a copy of the magazine or a cover poster via Magcloud, and use code BF25 to get a discount (on these or any Magcloud publication) through 11/28/2022 (the actual discount varies by publisher and issue, btw). Note that I don’t make any money off of purchases direct from Magcloud, just the Tiki issue and posters (I have one mag copy left and a handful of posters if you want to help feed my pinup addiction. I mean, support me as I pursue this noble hobby! Ha!).

This one’s kinda meta, because my nom-de-pinup is Catherine Morland and I’m actually portraying Jane Austen’s heroine from Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, in the photo set. As she’s into gothic romances and horrid novels of all kinds, we have Catherine reading novels by candlelight in a spooky forestscape of her imagination. Eat your heart out, Emily St. Aubert!

Retro Lovely Masquerade Catherine Morland Cover
I cosplay as Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland…my pinup namesake!

More after the jump…

We didn’t go full 1790s, but we could have. The cotton-print robe volante I’m wearing in some of the shots is an earlier 18th century style made in a very fashion-forward printed cotton (printed cottons were in demand for most of the 1700s, but weren’t truly ubiquitous until later in the century for a number of reasons). April of Fashions Revisited made it, and it’s one of my favorite things. The “shift” is a dress from Amazon that we felt was more figure-flattering than the period-correct linen chemise I’d planned to wear. And of course, we went with a wild bedtime hairdo that is pure fantasy…but we like it. It makes me look like I’ve been rooting around in a mysterious cabinet looking for secrets. Which, you know, Catherine does in the novel (the weird old papers she finds end up being receipts and laundry lists, hah).

I cosplay as Northanger Abbey's Catherine Morland...my pinup namesake!
I cosplay as Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland…my pinup namesake!
I cosplay as Northanger Abbey's Catherine Morland...my pinup namesake!
I cosplay as Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland…my pinup namesake!

Incidentally, I don’t have fancy-looking copies of Northanger Abbey or The Mysteries of Udolpho or any real gothic romances (seriously, they’re all workhorse paperbacks or combined hardback editions like the Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen set), so I chose a large-ish, pretty edition of Emma (I seriously have like forty copies of that, many of them hardback) and my grandmother’s 1920s edition of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat because they would look cool in photos.

You can find all of my issues and posters via my Linktree at any time.

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