Imagine! A character being the product of her times! Tsk. Damned inconvenient, that.

@LaBD: I've never been able to work out the chicken-and-egg dimension of what I understand of attitude to TB in the 19th century. Would Violetta and Mimi (oh, for example) have been considered highly sexed *because* they came down with TB, or did TB cause them to become more readily aroused? Was TB taken as a signifier of sexual freedom, a consequence of it, or its cause? Nerdy minds want to know. (Well, okay, maybe just the one does.)

Cornish was remarkable and to my mind deserved an Academy Award nomination. She gave dignity to what might otherwise have been a silly girl, a her grief was to me quite moving.

So, yeah, kudos indeed to the costume designer.

And yes, Attica, I do believe Ben Whishaw is a tiny person. My carpool buddies and I came up with a nickname for him (… is that weird?) to match his British smallness and lightness and also because we figured as Americans we'd never be able to give his last name justice. It went from Ben Wish, to Ben Wh–, and finally settled on Ben *blowing noise*. Like you're blowing out a candle. It greatly amused us but I can't say why; many things are amusing at 6:30 in the morning that wouldn't normally be.

@Suzanne M: I haven't seen the movie yet, but if that's what you thought you saw, I can almost guarantee that that is, indeed what you saw – and it's a tribute to the costume designer/person who made that decision, because it is ABSOLUTELY in keeping with the kind of homedressmaking that women did, for centuries.

Even once sewing manuals started being written (by various incarnations of A Lady) for the benefit and education of servants, parsons' wives, the lower (and middle) classes, the instructions involve "take an old bodice and pick it to pieces"/"prick through the seams of an old bodice onto a piece of paper". Paper patterns as we know them weren't available at the period in which the movie was set, so a woman who made her own dresses would be very likely to make multiples of a dress she owned that already worked for her (in terms of cut, fit, etc.). And maybe even if it didn't – just because you might have to do your own* sewing didn't necessarily mean that you were good at it, or that you liked it.

So extra bonus points for that bit of realism.

*Yes, dressmakers were omnipresent, but their wages could cost as much as half again what the material cost. That doesn't mean they were well-paid, either; many seamstresses had to supplement their earnings with prostitution, or starve. There were a LOT of women competing for those seamstress jobs, and it served to depress the market. They were competing with comfortable middle-class women, as well, since it was considered Morally Improving for women to save money by doing the sewing themselves.

Bravo to your Piano criticisms. Campion's neo-romantic anachronisms and excesses annoy me something chronic! However, if you're interested in the text that calls Campion's Best Original Screenplay Oscar into question, try to get hold of "The Story of a New Zealand River" by Jane Mander (1920).

Campion has been quite open about how she began a screenplay for the novel several years before it became "The Piano," but didn't like the way the main character responded to her situation – in other words she was quite 19thC about it all and, you know, didn't play minimalist music on the beach and exchange sex for her piano, etc.

The novel isn't brilliant, but it really captures the time and practical considerations the character has to make within her society.

I haven't seen Bright Star yet, but the comments above have confirmed my suspicions. Also, I once spoke to an Australian academic who was advising Campion on Keats during the initial writing of the screenplay and she was fairly scathing of Campion's take on Fanny and John. In particular her complete refusal to consider that John might have preferred to go to Italy with the boys. But anyway, that was just what someone said at a conference.