an inexpensive, plain-woven cotton fabric. When made sheer it was a very popular dress material in the 18th century. It was also used as a filter (as cheese-cloth) in wine-making, cheese-making and pudding-making.
photo: By Unknown - LACMA Image Library. Photograph LACMA., Public Domain,
Darya Alexandrovna, delayed by anxiety over her own attire, came out and got in, dressed in a white muslin gown.
Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina (1878)
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but that day, with David Bowie insisting in my ear - "Let's dance, let's dance" - I began to do so with complete abandon, the skirt on my white muslin sundress flaring our like Isadora Duncan's.
Sue Monk Kidd. The Mermaid Chair, p.233 (2005)
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Out into the street, and though we had been up for an hour and a half, we were now for the first time in the light of day! Mist! It would probably be called “pearly” by some novelists; but it was like blue mousseline—diaphanous as a dancer’s skirt.
Arnold Bennett. Paris Nights and Other Impressions of Places and People (1913)
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Their eyes were immediately wandering up in the street in quest of the officers, and nothing less than a very smart bonnet indeed, or a really new muslin in a shop window, could recall them.
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice (1813)
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“We’ll need to filter it after it’s boiled,” she remarked, as though going on with our previous conversation. “I think we’ll run it through charcoal in muslin; that’s best.”
Diana Gabaldon. Outlander (1991)
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Under British rule, the British East India company could not compete with the local Muslin with their own export of cloth to India. Muslin production was repressed and the knowledge eradicated. Local weavers were systematically rounded up and their hands mutilated with removal of their thumbs.
Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain
George Orwell. 1984 (1949)
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As we approached, the door flew open, and a little blonde woman stood in the opening, clad in some sort of light mousseline de soie, with a touch of fluffy pink chiffon at her neck and wrists.
Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes: The Man with the Twisted Lip