‘Women Dressing Women’ Review: Sisters in Style

New York

The novelist A.S. Byatt died late last year, three weeks before the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened the exhibition “Women Dressing Women.” I thought of Ms. Byatt when I walked into one of the show’s galleries, titled “Visibility,” and was stopped short by two gowns that mixed silks of marine blue and emerald green, stunningly primeval. The first, named “The Styx” for the underworld river, was designed in 1936 by Elizabeth Hawes, an American in Paris; the second came from the house of Mad Carpentier in the late 1940s. Here were dresses fit for the medieval Fairy Melusine, a freshwater spirit who is a powerful presence in Ms. Byatt’s best-selling 1990 novel “Possession,” which nestles a secret romance between two Victorian poets inside a modern romance, 100 years later, between two scholars who are researching those poets. In lines like “She wore . . . a girdle green / As emerald or wettest meadow-grass. / Her blue-veined feet played in the watery space,” the scholars see Melusine, elemental and autonomous, in a liminal space.