Here are some of the other things that scene tells us:

1. Dorothea spends her spare time designing model cottages for farmworkers.

2. The sisters' mother has been dead for at least 6 months.

3. Dorothea is the elder sister and is the dominant, deciding one, though it looks as if Celia often gets her way by subtle wiles. In their sisterly relationship they take on something like archetypal masculine and feminine roles.

4. The scene is also about the girls as sexual beings and as sex objects. Jewellery is worn to attract men who are possible husbands. Jewellery is also about sensuality in a more personal, individual sense, about girls enjoying their own beauty, their own femininity, their own sexuality. The scene is saying that Celia has no problems with this, and that Dorothea has. Now I'm not sure if George Eliot would agree with me, but I am suggesting that Dorothea has these problems not only because she is very religious, idealistic and self-denying, but because she is underneath all this much more highly sexed than Celia: "It's strange how deeply colours seem to...penetrate one."

Ref code: PM-50. Title: Extract from letter to David Snodin from Andrew Davies giving his interpretation of insights offered by the Jewellery scene (Scene 1.7) Date: 1991-07-10. Format: .png. Source: D/061/A043/C/01, Papers of Andrew Davies, Screenwriter, De Montfort University Special Collections UK, https://specialcollections.catalogue.dmu.ac.uk/records/D/061/A/043/C/01