Yes, women did not go barelegged in the Edwardian era. You wore stockings or you weren't fully dressed. Also, it's not like all women look like hairy bears just because they don't shave. I shave my legs because you're supposed to, but you'd have to curl up real close to see if I didn't. I once went to a salon for a waxing of my legs and afterwards the girl said: "You know, if I were you, I wouldn't bother with this. Just take a pair of tweezers and pull out the three hairs you have." That's about how much hair on my legs I have.
And Edwardian medicine was pretty well advanced. What Belle describes sounds more like 18th century than early 20th century medicine. The single biggest difference was that they didn't have antibiotics, so bacterial diseases were often fatal, not because you didn't know what they were but because you had no treatment for them. My great-grandfather died as late as 1935 from pneumonia because he refused to use the young doctor who prescribed sulfa for bacterial infections and relied on the old one who had no remedies. But the Edwardians performed pretty advanced surgery and had a very good idea about the causes and transmission of diseases. Of course, you could buy lots of drugs (like morphine) in the pharmacy without a prescription so you had plenty of opportunity to treat yourself in a way you couldn't do today (and just think of all those old mysteries, where access to arsenic and other poisons is very liberal).
I think the forms of communication would strike someone someone used to ubiquitous mobile phones and internet as unfamiliar. You had phones and telegrams, but far from everyone had a phone, and it wasn't used for communication nearly as much as later. Letters were still the major form of communication, and at least in London, the post came 3 times a day. News didn't really spread until today's newspaper edition had been printed and distributed, and while wireless communication was available, it wasn't a major form of communication. You just have to look at the spies of WWI (which I am currently reading about) to realise that they almost exclusively communicated with HQ by letter, no matter nationality.
Also, things I think would be noticeably different: how so many things were done manually and required much greater manual labour (labour was still pretty cheap), the abject poverty of the those dwelling in the underbelly of the cities, seeing children working hard, the lack of traffic noise, the sound of clattering of hooves and wheels on stone, the way at least English cities were black from the soot of hundreds of thousands of coal fires, the stiffness and formality of of clothing with starched collars and top hats and huge hats (and stockings
)... And people spoke differently – not just in terms of word choice, but in terms of accents. In many countries, regional differences were much greater, class was more noticeable, and often it just sounded... Different. You only have to go back to the 1950s here in Sweden for people to sound really different with much, much clearer diction and people in the early 20th century would think I sounded really weird. For English, just compare modern "educated" English with the way the upper classes spoke in the Edwardian era - demonstrated
here by Herbert Henry Asquith.
Another thing: everything was much more seasonal. That might be more or less noticeable depending on where your character is, but here in Sweden fresh produce and fresh flowers simply weren't available in the the winter, no matter how much money you had. Not even hothouses managed to produce things in our cold and, most of all, extremely dark, climate (if you have 2 hours of daylight and no artificial sunlight, things won't grow) and importing things in an era where transport took time and you couldn't deep-freeze things for the transport, meant that you were very limited in what was available to buy.
But in general, I'd think Evangeline is our resident expert on the Edwardian era. If you haven't looked at her site
The Edwardian Promenade you really should.
