"Prudery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to Esther than the steps taken by Nucingen. The hapless girl, in defending her fidelity, was defending her life. This very natural instinct was what Carlos called prudery. Now Asie, not without taking such precautions as usual in such cases, went off to report to Carlos the conference she had held with the Baron, and all the profit she had made by it. The man's rage, like himself, ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... merchanted is no more and no less than intelligence—intelligence so keen that it can penetrate to the hidden truth through the most formidable wrappings of false semblance and demeanour, and so little corrupted by sentimental prudery that it is equal to the even more difficult task of hauling that truth out into the light, in all its naked hideousness. Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... strained politeness may have been artificial, and the forms of chivalry very likely outran the feeling, but they served at least to keep it alive, while the false platonism and ultra-refined sentiment were simply moral protests against the coarse vices of the time. The prudery which reached a satirical climax in "Les Precieuses Ridicules" was a natural reaction from the sensuality of a Marguerite and a Gabrielle. Mme. de Rambouillet saw and enjoyed the first performance of ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... Renaissance; and in our chastened and reverent mood, it almost takes our breath away when your high-priestess unrolls the last pronunciamento, and tells us her startling story of 'Euphorion!' Why? Ah!—don't you know? The Puritan leaven of prudery, and the stern, stolid, phlegmatic decorum of Knickerbockerdom mingle in that consummate flower of the nineteenth century occident, the 'American Girl', who pales and flushes at sight of the carnival of the undraped—in English art and literature. Here, Leo, take your anemones; red, are they ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... gown had a Puritan conscience, an almost morbid sense of its duty. It more than clothed her, it covered her up as if she had been a guilty secret; there was concealment and disguise in every crease of the awful garment. In its imperishable prudery it refused to define her by ever so innocent a curve; all its folds were implicated in a conspiracy against her sex. The effect, though striking, was obviously unstudied and inevitable, and he argued charitably that ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... short abruptly, and he set her down, his ears tingling. For Sissy, outraged in her sense of dignity as well as in the offish prudery that characterized her, declined to accept patronage as anybody's little sister, and boxed his ears as well as she could in the short ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... doubtful meaning. If the phrase may be interpreted decently, and with such interpretation would provoke a smile, then smile to just the degree called for by such interpretation, and no more. The prudery which sits in solemn and severe rebuke at a double entendre is only second in indelicacy to the indecency which grows hilarious over it, since both must recognize the evil intent. It is sufficient to let ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... they went straightway to bed. Burlingham drew the curtains round the berth let down for Susan. The others indulged in no such prudery on so hot a night. They put out the lamps and got ready for bed and into it by the dim light trickling in through the big rear doorway and the two small side doorways forward. To help on the circulation of air Pat raised the stage curtain and drop, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... persisted in her prudery, nor did the youth, in fact, seem altogether free from a similar sort of shyness; so they sat apart from each other, gazing up the hill, where the moonlight discovered the tops of a group of buildings. While their attention was thus occupied, ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... vulgar person, who would have required the stranger to be properly recommended by somebody who came over in the Mayflower, before she helped him. Not a feeble-minded damsel, who, if she had not fainted, would have fled away, gasping and in tears. No timidity or prudery or underbred doubts about this thorough creature. She knew she was in her right womanly place, and she meant to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... bear; she is the most detestable creature I know. I would rather be buried alive in the country, than join in London society under her care; with her long speeches of prudery and virtue, and the modest reserve of young ladies, and a hundred other such saint-like terms, when all the time she is doing all she can to catch husbands for her three great gawky daughters, who in mamma's ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... gravely there; this was not Coralie's infatuated adorer, not the easy-natured, indolent, incredulous libertine whom he had known hitherto as Camusot, but a heavy father of a family, a merchant grown old in shrewd expedients of business and respectable virtues, wearing a magistrate's mask of judicial prudery; this Camusot was the cool, business-like head of the firm surrounded by clerks, green cardboard boxes, pigeonholes, invoices, and samples, and fortified by the presence of a wife and a plainly-dressed daughter. Lucien trembled from head to foot as he approached; for the worthy merchant, like ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... of the Supreme Court, says, "If I had been a legislator I would never have voted for this law.... It is evident that mere nudity in painting and sculpture is not obscenity. It is a false delicacy and mere prudery which would condemn and banish from sight all such objects." Public opinion should be directed against the vice society which employs and pays such a tool as Comstock. The prosecution which he instigated against Mrs. Elmina Slenker, of Virginia, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... a character the most uncongenial to his own; cold, reserved, and most anxiously prudent in her attention to money, she was of a temper which every day grew worse by the perpetual imprudence and thoughtlessness of his own. He calls her "Prue" in fondness and reproach; she was Prudery itself! His adoration was permanent, and so were his complaints; and they never parted but with bickerings—yet he could not suffer her absence, for he was writing to her three or four passionate notes in a day, which are dated from his office, or his ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... had clung to it instinctively as he had clung to the vague memory of his mother. No word of mine and no teaching was to destroy so precious a heritage. He was not goody-goody about it. No boy who did and said and thought the things that Jerry did could be accused of prudery or sentimentalism. But in his quieter moods I knew that he thought deeply of ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... will, having precluded all advances on your part. The declaration, without the most indirect invitation of yours, must proceed from the man, to render it permanent and valuable, and nothing short of good sense, and an easy, unaffected conduct can draw the line between prudery and coquetry. It would be no great departure from truth to say that it rarely happens otherwise than that a thorough-paced coquette dies in celibacy, as a punishment for her attempts to mislead others by encouraging looks, words, or actions, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... Prosody declared that the wheel of the buggy would certainly be torn off in the attempt, and, losing her usual prudery in terror, whipped off her stockings, and proceeded to wade, to the exposure of a very attenuated ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... excite a little uneasiness and apprehension: in his conduct there is nothing to except against. He is a person of strict integrity himself, without pretence or affectation; and knows how to respect this quality in others, without prudery or intolerance. He can censure a friend or a stranger, and serve him effectually at the same time. He expresses his disapprobation, but not as an excuse for closing up the avenues of his liberality. ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... it has points of contact with both. The distinctive feature of the Englishman's attitude is his spirit of extreme individualism (which distinguishes him from the German) combined with the religious nature of his moral fervour (which distinguishes him from the Frenchman), both being veiled by a shy prudery (which distinguishes him alike from the Frenchman and the German). The Englishman's reverence for the individual's rights goes beyond the Frenchman's, for in France there is a tendency to subordinate the individual to the family, and in England the interests of the individual ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... witness to the rhapsody of mystic nonsense which these two fair ones debate incessantly, and consequently cannot figure what must be the issue of this triple alliance: we have some idea of it. Only figure the coalition of prudery, debauchery, sentiment, history, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and metaphysics; all, except the second, understood by halves, by quarters, or not at all. You shall have the journals of this notable academy. Adieu, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... moral." But there is in it, as I have said, a touch of sentimentality. If sentiment is properly defined as "higher feeling," sentimentality is "affectation of fine or tender feeling or exquisite sensibility." Heartless coquetry, prudery, mock modesty, are bosom friends of sentimentality. While sentiment is the noblest thing in the world, sentimentality is its counterfeit, its caricature; there is something theatrical, operatic, painted-and-powdered ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... story of Mag's adoption into the Storm household, and it had rather shocked him. What was the woman thinking of to surround her young daughters with such influences? Naturally one would not expect prudery, conventionality, from the mistress of Storm, but in his experience quite declasee women guarded more carefully than this ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... Crystal Palace) when I was near London; and (most complete of all) she offered to call on us in Edinburgh! Wasn't it delicious?—she is a girl of sixteen or seventeen, too, and the latter I think. I never yet saw a girl so innocent and fresh, so perfectly modest without the least trace of prudery. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Diary referred to another great error in a portion of the American women. Lady Blessington, in one of her delightful works, very truly observes, "I turn with disgust from that affected prudery, arising, if not from a participation, at least from a knowledge of evil, which induces certain ladies to cast down their eyes, look grave, and shew the extent of their knowledge, or the pruriency of their imaginations, by discovering ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Act, women and women-like men wallowed in righteousness. Never did I hear more nonsense talked than at the meetings I attended on this subject. Women's instinctive attitude had a unique chance of displaying itself, and one wondered at the combined prudery and sentiment with which the subject was approached, while the most offensive part of their conventionalism was the sex-obsession, which was clotted, like cream turned ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... for gesticulation, and look upon it as something vulgar and undignified. This seems to me a silly prejudice on their part, and the outcome of their general prudery. For here we have a language which nature has given to every one, and which every one understands; and to do away with and forbid it for no better reason than that it is opposed to that much-lauded thing, gentlemanly feeling, is ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Pericles we might at our ease eulogise those beautiful serpentine lines, those polished flanks, those elegant curves, those breasts which might have served as moulds for the cup of Hebe; but modern prudery forbids such descriptions, for the pen cannot find pardon for what is permitted to the chisel; and besides, there are some things which can be ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... had startled her by an assumption of intimacy, a softening of his voice, and a look of tenderness in his eyes, which made her shrink into herself with an instinctive emotion of dislike. But she had then proceeded to scold herself for foolish shyness and prudery—the prudery of a French-school girl, who was not accustomed to the ways of men. She had begun to feel herself very ignorant of the world since she came to her father's house. It would never do to offend one of her father's friends by seeming afraid of him. So ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... or prudery, or delicacy, or love of ease, keep one half of the world out of the way of observing what the other ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... and Jesus! I don't know what sort of folk they can be, so unfeeling and heartless, that rather than bestow a glance upon a worthy man they leave him to die or go mad. I don't know what is the good of such prudery; if it is for honour's sake, why not marry them? That's ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Wordsworth's purity afterwards grew sensitive almost to prudery. The late Mr. Clough told me that he heard him at Dr. Arnold's table denounce the first line in Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn as indecent, and Haydon records that when he saw the group of Cupid and Psyche he ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... making himself familiar with Mr. Long's 'History of the Decline of the Roman Republic' and Mommsen's 'History of Rome.' To do over again (as though the work had never been attempted) what has been done once for all accurately and well, would be mere prudery of punctiliousness. But while I acknowledge my debt of gratitude to both these eminent historians, I must add that for the whole period I have carefully examined the original authorities, often coming to conclusions ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... systems of the universe, as revealed in astronomy or in chemistry, something too of the truth about life, what we animals really are, what our place and what our powers, a truth ungarbled whether by prudery ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... more, to the pure all things are pure, as well as all persons. That which is natural lies not in things, but in the minds of men. There is a difference between prudery and modesty. Prudery detects wrong where no wrong is; the wrong lies in the thoughts, and not in the objects. There is something of over-sensitiveness and over-delicacy which shows not innocence, but an inflammable imagination. And men ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... Laurence Sterne that it is a disgrace to European civilization that there exist so few physiological observations on callipedy, and he refuses to state the results of his Meditations on this subject, because it would be difficult to formulate them in terms of prudery, and they would be but little understood, and misinterpreted. Such reserve produces an hiatus in this part of the book; but the author has the pleasant satisfaction of leaving a fourth work to be accomplished by the next century, to which he ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... these sides of life be absolutely excluded? By no means. Our decency need not weaken into prudery. It all lies in the spirit in which it is done. No one who wished to lecture on these various spirits could preach on a better text than these three great rivals, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. It is possible to draw vice with some freedom for the purpose ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... this is!" she said, pleasantly. "Must I put it more plainly still? Engage in what your English prudery calls a 'flirtation,' with some woman here—the lower in degree the better, or the Princess might be jealous—and let the affair be seen and known by everybody about the Court. Sly as he is, the Doctor is not ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... and fantastic creeds as its fruits; on the other hand, it crystallized into the hysterical temperance movement of the 30's and 40's, which penetrated to the very floor of Congress and put "dry" laws upon the statute-books of ten States; and on the third hand, as it were, it established a prudery in speech and thought from which we are yet but half delivered. Such ancient and innocent words as "bitch" and "bastard" disappeared from the American language; Bartlett tells us, indeed, in his "Dictionary ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... jealous of your sister, Le Gardeur," said Angelique, raising her face to his, suffused with a blush; "if I do not give you the love you ask for it is because you have it already; but ask no more at present from me—this, at least, is yours," said she, kissing him twice, without prudery ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... pronounced his act a piece of political prudery. One journalistic wag observed, 'A lady's footman jumped off the Great Western train, going forty miles an hour, merely to pick up his hat. Pretty much like this act, so disproportional to the occasion, is Mr. Gladstone's leap out of the ministry to follow his book.' When the time came ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... ill fortune by what Fate and my own fault has deprived me of—the affection of a woman or a child." Here there came a sigh from somewhere near Warrington in the dark, and a hand was held out in his direction, which, however, was instantly withdrawn, for the prudery of our females is such, that before all expression of feeling, or natural kindness and regard, a woman is taught to think of herself and the proprieties, and to be ready to blush at the very slightest ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... reply. This display of patriotic prudery evidently aroused his failing dignity, for with a brief salute he made for his own ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... that Mrs. Thorpe was secretly vain of her child. She had long since, poor woman, forced down the strong strait-waistcoats of prudery and restraint over every other moral weakness but this—of all vanities the most beautiful; of all human failings surely the most pure! Yes, she was proud of Zack! The dear, naughty, handsome, church-disturbing, door-kicking, house-flooding Zack! If he had been a plain-featured ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... handicapped in their locomotion in their own homes is simply a relic of oriental slavery and prudery, and the revolt against it is sensible and wholesome. That they have come to stay is evident, while improved costumes for shop girls, and other women engaged in business every day in the year, are certain to follow in the order of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... at him for a moment hesitatingly. There was no prudery about Mary Gray. She had become a woman of the world, and she had had no reason to distrust the camaraderie of men or to think it less ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... in ery, signify action or habit; as, "Slavery, foolery, prudery," &c. Some nouns of this sort come from adjectives; as, "Brave, ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... fell upon his ear, de Sigognac impulsively tried to kiss the sweet lips so temptingly near his own, but Isabelle withdrew herself gently from his embrace; not with any show of excessive prudery, but with a modest timidity that no really gallant lover would ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... said, mindful of her manners, shaking R——, P——, and me, by the hand, "tak, tak;" and gathering her petticoats tight about her legs, yet without any semblance of prudery, walked to the gangway, and, without aid, jumped into the boat. Seating herself on the scarlet cushions, the cockswain receiving permission from her to go on, with all the gravity due to a queen gave the word to his men, and away the gig shot, the girl kissing her hand all ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... dusky mantle covers The skies (and the more duskily the better), The Time less liked by husbands than by lovers Begins, and Prudery flings aside her fetter; And Gaiety on restless tiptoe hovers, Giggling with all the gallants who beset her; And there are songs and quavers, roaring, humming, Guitars, and every ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... occasion, he was careful to say nothing open and direct, by which he should be detected. If ever he ventured so far as to excite serious questions from me, he was ever ready with evasive answers, and had something like reasoning to offer, in defence of his own manners and in ridicule of prudery. He began with caution, but when he had accustomed me to such discourse, and after I had heard it repeated even in the presence of his clerical companions, of which you, Mr. Trevor, were once a witness, my surprize wore away; the pain it gave ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... have an absolute necessity to communicate with Darrell. You have to give him these documents—to explain how you came by them. Sophy is with him; you are bound to see her on a subject of such vital importance to herself. Scruples of prudery! You, Caroline Lyndsay, the friend of his daughter—you whose childhood was reared in his very house—you whose mother owed to him such obligations—you to scruple in being the first to acquaint him with information affecting him so nearly! And why, forsooth? Because, ages ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... leading her piteous forlorn hope. Her chance—her unique chance, in nowise to be missed—and, still more, those obscure hungers, fed by the excitement of this midnight tete-a-tete, rushed her forward upon the abyss; while at every sputtering sentence, whether of adulation, misplaced prudery, or thinly veiled animosity towards Damaris, she became more tedious, more frankly intolerable and ridiculous to him whose favour she so desperately sought. Under less anxious circumstances Charles Verity might have been contemptuously amused at this ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... seem rather to arise from the author's remembering that his hero must do something to support the character, than to result naturally from the situations in which he is placed, and his love of decorum is carried, on all occasions, to an absurd extent of prudery. "Le heros de la piece est d'une sagesse qui a donne lieu a des railleries assez plaisantes," says Bayle; though the instance usually cited—a box on the ear, which he gives Chariclea, when she approaches him in her beggar's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... society. For its brutal horseplay and uncivil practical joking which passed for wit, Akenside had no tolerance, yet he felt unwilling to go where he would be outshone by inferior men. His strutty arrogance of manner, like excessive prudery in a woman, may have been a fortification to a garrison too weak to fight in the open field. And it must be admitted that, as so often happens, Akenside's outward ensemble was eminently what the vulgar world terms "guyable." ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... lovers—a legion of them, from the Duke of Buckingham to the youngest page at Court, she treated in precisely the same way. Was it innocence or artfulness, this assumption of childish prudery? "She was a child," says Count Hamilton, "in all respects save playing with dolls"—a child who refused to grow into a woman, and yet, one shrewdly suspects that behind her childishness was a motive deeper than is usually associated ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... strength, and the truth to nature of John Bunyan's mind. His was eminently an honest, straightforward, manly, English understanding. A smaller man would not have ventured on Mr. Brisk in such a book as the Pilgrim's Progress. But there is no affectation, there is no prudery, there is no superiority to nature in John Bunyan. He knew quite well that of the thousands of men and women who were reading his Pilgrim there was no subject, not even religion itself, that was taking up half so much of their thoughts ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... and not (like the middle class in the French Revolution) insisting on a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme. It went along with the decision of the aristocracy to recruit itself more freely from the middle class. It was then also that Victorian "prudery" began: the great lords yielded on this as on Free Trade. These two decisions have made the doubtful England of to-day; and Macaulay is typical of them; he is the bourgeois in Belgravia. The alliance is marked by his great speeches for Lord Grey's ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... silence has been crushed by a policy of thundering outcry, which is heard in every home and every nursery. This loudness of debate is surely an effect of the horror with which the appalling misery around us is suddenly discovered. All which was hidden by prudery is disclosed in its viciousness, and this outburst of indignation is the result. Yet it would never have swollen to this overwhelming flood if the nation were not convinced that this is the only way to cause a betterment and a new hope. The evil was the result of the silence itself. Free ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... giving the heart is one of the last of all laughable considerations in the marriage of a girl of spirit, yet I should like to hear what antiquated notions the dear little piece of old-fashioned prudery has got in ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... moment's reflection will teach you that I could not accept your hospitality. You have no lady, I believe, at Beresford Manors? No one there except the colored servants? Therefore, you see, it would not be proper for me to go there," said Mary Grey, affecting a prudery that she did not feel, and objecting to the place only because she did not choose to bury herself in a house more lonely, dreary and deserted, if possible, than Blue Cliff ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... accord moral privileges to artists, partly from the very objectionable tradition that the realm of art is Alsatia and the contemplation of works of art a holiday from the burden of virtue, partly because French prudery does not attach itself to the same points of behavior as British prudery, and has a different code of the mentionable and the unmentionable, and for many other reasons the French tolerate plays which are never performed in England until they have been spoiled by a process of bowdlerization; ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... short, sought to chasten and check the luxuriant overgrowth to which the example and method of the Pleiades were tending to push the language of poetry in French. The resultant effect of the two contrary tendencies—that of literary wantonness on the one hand, and that of literary prudery on the other—was at the same time to enrich and to purify French poetical diction. Balzac (the elder), close to Malherbe in time, performed a service for French prose similar to that which the latter performed for French verse. These two critical and literary powers brought in the ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... and she stood intently listening for Veronique's step, wishing that her companions would hold their peace; but the adventure amused them, and they discussed whether it were a blunder of the CONCIERGE, or a piece of prudery of Madame la Comtesse, or, after all, a precaution. The palace so full of strange people, who could say what might happen? And there was a talk of a conspiracy of the Huguenots. At any rate, every one was too much frightened to go to sleep, and, some sitting on the floor, some on a chest, some on ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... delicate."—The Author readily acknowleges [sic], that too delicate she is for the Hearts of such as, by Conformity to the loose Manners of the present Age, have confounded Purity with Prudery. But, for all this, it may be hoped, that the latter will rather endeavour to raise their Affections to Clarissa's virtuous Standard, than by striving to impeach her Character, effectually debase, if not violently tear up, the decisive ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... surrounded and unapproachable; and a flood of new arrivals distracted Madame d'Estrees' attention. The Ricci, who had noticed the restrained empressement of his reception, pounced on the young man, taming her ways and gestures to what she supposed to be his English prudery, and produced an immediate effect upon him. Lord Magellan, who was only dumb with English marriageable girls, allowed himself to be amused, and threw himself into a low chair by the actress—a ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... while watching the path down which she had disappeared, wondering at her abrupt departure, which for the moment drove from his mind all thought of McGuire's troubles. It was difficult to associate Beth with the idea of prudery or affectation. Her visit proved that. She had come to the Cabin because she had wanted to hear him play, because she had wanted to sing for him, because too his promises had excited her curiosity about him, and inspired a hope of his assistance. But the visit had flattered Peter. He wasn't ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... their big soft eyes dreamily contemplating the opposite pine wood, with that large capacity for perfect idleness common to their species. Bates was chewing a straw and swinging his hunting-crop somewhere in attendance. He went with his young mistress everywhere, and played the part of the "dragon of prudery placed within call;" but he was a very amiable dragon, and nobody minded him. Had it come into the minds of Rorie and Vixen to elope, Bates would not have barred their way. Indeed he would have been very glad to elope with them himself. The restricted license ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... in defence of Miss Barton's prudery; and at last ended by saying, "that he'd stake his life upon it, she was no jilt. If she had taken a fancy to you, Wright, she would honestly tell me so, I'm convinced; and, when she finds you are thinking of another woman, her pride would ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... women seemed to resent her. It was so soon apparent that she had nothing in common with them that they appeared to combine to shock her. Mistress Dearmer led the laughter at what she termed Barbara's country manners and prudery. There were few things in heaven or earth exempt from the ridicule of Mrs. Dearmer's tongue, and it was a loose tongue, full of coarse tales and licentious wit. She was a pretty woman, which, from ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... born on the 22d of April, 1707, at Sharpham Park, Somersetshire. While yet a young man, he had read Pamela; and to ridicule what he considered its prudery and over-righteousness, he hastily commenced his novel of Joseph Andrews. This Joseph is represented as the brother of Pamela,—a simple country lad, who comes to town and finds a place as Lady Booby's footman. As Pamela had resisted her master's seductions, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... big school have the great mystery of Nature sullied for them in their tender years by coarseness and depravity. Whereas, in ancient Greek times, the mystery was holy, and with a pious mind men worshipped the Force of Nature without exaggerated prudery and without shamelessness, such conditions are impossible in a society where for a thousand years Nature herself has been depreciated by Religion, associated with sin and the Devil, stamped as unmentionable and in preference denied, in which, for that very reason, brutality takes so much ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... if there was something labouring in her mind which she either could not or would not impart. I hardly knew how to bear this first reception after so long an absence, and so different from the one my sentiments towards her merited; but I thought it possible it might be prudery (as I had returned without having actually accomplished what I went about) or that she had taken offence at something in my letters. She saw how much I was hurt. I asked her, "If she was altered since I went away?"—"No." "If there was any one else who had been so fortunate ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... him keenly alive to the proximity of the sublime to the ridiculous or the exquisite to the grotesque. Though he had little of the animal in him, and was never troubled by his appetites, he was quite free from prudery. If obscenity moved him at all, it was to frank laughter or to grim contempt; he never dwelt upon it, either in the way of enjoyment or loathing. "For rules of ascetic discipline," says a friend, "he ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... expression of reserve that should be as good as irony for irony, though where Madame de Rouaillout's irony lay, or whether it was irony at all, our excellent English dame could not have stated, after the feeling of indignant prudery responding to it so guiltily ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Julien, greatly embarrassed, obeyed her suggestions, and uncovered his foot. Reine, without any prudery or nonsense, raised the wounded ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... together at all. The disagreeable secret had begun to spread; all the children would relate the events of yesterday in their own homes; to pass the thing over was impossible. She sincerely regretted the step she must take, and to which she would not have felt herself driven by any ill-placed prudery of her own. On Monday morning it must be stated to the girls that Ida Starr ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... One is conscious throughout of a careful anxiety that every avenue to "suggestiveness" shall be just hinted and at once decently veiled. There is something unpleasant, painful, degrading in this ingenious mingling of prurience and prudery. The spectators, if they think of it at all, must realise that throughout the whole trivial performance their emotions are being basely played upon, and yet that they are being treated with an insulting precaution which would be more in place in a lunatic asylum than in a gathering ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... Brig of Donegal, Lady 'DON JUAN,' a scene in it adapted from the 'Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno Commencement of the poem The 1st canto finished 50 copies to be printed privately 2nd canto 'Nonsensical prudery' against it Mr. Murray in a fright about it The papers not so fierce as was anticipated Authorship to be kept anonymous General outcry against the poem Spurious 3rd cantos Mr. Murray going to law The author hurt but not frightened A French ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... wonderfully made; while as for his grandeur of form, any college youth who scrambles up him, peel him out of his shooting jacket and trousers, is a hundred times more beautiful, and more grand too, by all laws of art. But so it is. In our prurient prudery, we have got to despise the human, and therefore the truly divine, element in art, and look for inspiration, not to living men and women, but to leaves and straws, stocks and stones. It is an idolatry baser than that of the old Canaanites; ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... inasmuch as he is one of my cousins; he has the family voice and manner very strongly, and at any rate does not murder the text of Shakespeare. I have no more time to spare now, for I must get my tea and go to the theater. I must tell you, though, of an instance of provincial prudery (delicacy, I suppose I ought to call it) which edified us not a little at rehearsal this morning: the Mercutio, on seeing the nurse and Peter, called out, "A sail, a sail!" and terminated the speech in a significant ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... you took them peacefully and promptly, without prudery—that sentiment which I ever dread to excite, and which, when it is revealed in eye or gesture, I vindictively detest. To return. Not only did I watch you; but often—especially at eventide— another guardian angel was noiselessly hovering near: night ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... working in an age of literary pedantry and moral prudery, fancied that it was his duty to refine the style of his great ancestor, and to remove allusions open to ignorant misconstruction. Instead, therefore, of giving an exact transcript of the original poems, he set himself to soften down their harshness, to clear away ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... to her whole relations, from first to last, with Ladislaw. It is not easy to conceive anything more touchingly beautiful than these, more perfectly in harmony with her whole nature. Of anything approaching either coquetry or prudery she is incapable. The utter absence of all self-consciousness, whether of external beauty or inward loveliness; the ethereal purity, the childlike trustfulness, the instinctive recognition of all that is true and ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... a combination of sexual life with religious prescriptions are a mixture of ridiculous prudery and continual eroticism. In certain convents (those of the nuns of Galicia, for example) the nuns forbid their pupils to wash the sexual organs, because it is improper! In Austria the nuns often cover the crucifix in their ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... is to the libretto: ostensibly a means of interpretation, but actually a means of concealment. The Presbyterians made the mistake of keeping the doctrine of infant damnation in plain words. As enlightenment grew in the world, intelligence and prudery revolted against it, and so it had to be abandoned. Had it been set to music it would have survived—uncomprehended, unsuspected ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... oppressive bonds. Being free, we have a right to expect much of her. We expect her to give still greater expression to her feminine spirit—we expect her to enrich the intellectual, artistic, moral and spiritual life of the world. We expect her to demolish old systems of morals, a degenerate prudery, Dark-Age religious concepts, laws that enslave women by denying them the knowledge of their bodies, and information as to contraceptives. These must go to the scrapheap of vicious, cast-off things. Hers is the power to send them there. Shall we look to her to strike ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... loved a mortal being. For years my existence has belonged to her, she has been the centre of all my thoughts. It would seem to me as if the earth were without a sun, heaven without a God, if she should vanish from life. I even bless the torture which her prudery, her alternate coldness and friendliness cause me, as it comes from her, from the highest bliss of feeling. This passion has swept through my soul, as if uniting in itself all my youthful loves, till, like a torrent, ever renewing itself, ever moving onward, it has become ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... Pope, and Swift, and Prior, and Peterborough—Pope, with his truly playful 'What is Prudery?' Swift, with his charming lines to Stella; Prior, with his 'Dear Chloe, how blubber'd is that pretty face!' and Peterborough, with that ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... as he did so. Robert, however, was a success. The youngish men there found him interesting, and liked to shock him with tales of naughty London and naughtier Paris. They spoke of "experience" and "sensations" and "seeing life," and when a smile ploughed over his face, concluded that his prudery was vanquished. He saw that they were much less vicious than they supposed: one boy had obviously read his sensations in a book. But he could pardon vice. What he could not pardon was triviality, and he hoped that no decent woman could ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... character unsmirched And chaste themselves, are not ashamed to own. Virtue and vice had boundaries in old time Not to be passed; and she that had renounced Her sex's honour, was renounced herself By all that prized it; not for prudery's sake, But dignity's, resentful of the wrong. 'Twas hard, perhaps, on here and there a waif Desirous to return, and not received; But was a wholesome rigour in the main, And taught the unblemished ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... the place to try to make clear the importance of such secrecy and confidence between parents and child. There is a secrecy which adds a glamour of pleasurable naughtiness, leading straight to prudery and pruriency with all their consequences. Such secrecy is the sort that develops when parents do take the child into their confidence. Such harmful secrecy is not to be confounded with the confidence between parent ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... newspapers. Mr. Michelet's subject, and his late researches, lead him into details, moral and physical, which among ourselves are seldom mixed up with themes of general talk. The coarsest of these have been pruned away, but enough perhaps remain to startle readers of especial prudery. The translator, however, felt that he had no choice between shocking these and sinning against his original. Readers of a larger culture will make allowance for such a strait, will not be so very frightened at an amount ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... Further, every vice is opposed to a virtue. Now certain vices are opposed to shamefacedness, namely shamelessness and inordinate prudery. Therefore shamefacedness is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... worn crepe for my departed virtues for six years, but I throw it aside now and feel a new being whose glad unrestraint may carry her farther than she intended, just as prudery often lends a woman greater cruelty than ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... moment the marquise behaved to the poor youth with so much prudery, that, loving her as he did, sincerely, he would have died of grief, if he had not had the marquis at hand to encourage and strengthen him. Nevertheless, the latter himself began to despair, and to be more troubled by the virtue ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... evening, quite unexpectedly, on the girl herself. He by no means met with the reception which he had expected from the pretty girl in a faded cotton gown; Henrietta treated him with a certain amount of good humored respect, which had a much more unpleasant effect on him than that coldness and prudery, which is so often synonymous with coquetry and selfish speculation, among a certain class of women. In spite of everything, however, he soon went to see her daily, and lavished his wealth, without her asking him for anything, on the beautiful dancer, and he gave her no chance of refusing, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... should be shared by all—it cannot be left entirely to the Government, to Parliament, or to the medical profession. If a healthier atmosphere were created for the proper consideration of this subject, instead of the unwholesome fog of prudery in which it has been enveloped in the past, a great deal will ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... me? Ho! ho! Mr. Mayor; be no fool; seize fortune by the forelock. Man is only what he appears in the eyes of the world, and no one asks the nobleman how he became so. But there is my wife; she will set herself against my advancement, for I well know her Saxon prudery." ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... in dispelling for the moment the charm of her beauty. Her prudery, her deceit, her lies made up to me a ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... struck by these words, spoken with the glad unrestraint that always carries a woman further than she intended, just as prudery often lends her greater cruelty than she feels. For the first time since that glance, which had, in a way, been the beginning of their friendship, Caroline and Roger had the same idea; though they did not express it, they ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... with a magnificent movement full of varied emotions. If she had said in words: "Stop, or I shall die," she could not have spoken more plainly. She remained for a moment with her eyes in d'Arthez's eyes, expressing in that one glance happiness, prudery, fear, confidence, languor, a vague longing, and virgin modesty. She was twenty years old! but remember, she had prepared for this hour of comic falsehood by the choicest art of dress; she was there in her armchair like a flower, ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... the 1840's, where Lola found herself cast adrift, was a curious microcosm and full of contrasts. A mixture of unabashed blackguardism and cloistered prudery; of double-beds and primness; of humbug and frankness; of liberty and restraint; of lust and license; of brutal horse-play passing for "wit," and of candour marching with cant. The working classes scarcely called their souls ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... This "prurient prudery" of the vulgar mind was once strongly exhibited in Baltimore. The millionaire Winans had imported from abroad quite a number of classical statues, which he erected in the beautiful grounds around his palatial residence. The ignorant vulgarity ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... artificial as compared with her lord's,—which sprang, fresh and healthful, wholly from nature,—but still so void of all the chill of condescension or the subtle impertinence that belongs to that order of the inferior noblesse which boasts the name of "exclusives;" with what grace, void of prudery, she took the adulation of the flatterers, turning from them to her children, or escaping lightly to Lord Castleton, with an ease that drew round her at once the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... your Lisson Grove prudery here, young woman. You've got to learn to behave like a duchess. Take her away, Mrs. Pearce. If she gives ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... to be behindhand in politeness with La Fleur, had taken him back with him to the Count's hotel. La Fleur's PREVENANCY (for there was a passport in his very looks) soon set every servant in the kitchen at ease with him; and as a Frenchman, whatever be his talents, has no sort of prudery in showing them, La Fleur, in less than five minutes, had pulled out his fife, and leading off the dance himself with the first note, set the fille de chambre, the maitre d'hotel, the cook, the scullion, and all the house-hold, ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... marched on in this sullen manner about a mile, Fergus resumed the discourse in a different tone. 'I believe I was warm, my dear Edward, but you provoke me with your want of knowledge of the world. You have taken pet at some of Flora's prudery, or high-flying notions of loyalty, and now, like a child, you quarrel with the plaything you have been crying for, and beat me, your faithful keeper, because my arm cannot reach to Edinburgh to hand it to you. I am sure, if I was passionate, the mortification of losing the alliance of such a friend, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... And my prudery is consistent with the most laudable intentions, I assure you. But the fact is, dear chap, I go ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... every true man and woman at this hour of their country's day to begin to THINK, to weigh for himself or herself the meanings of the signs of the times, to use their critical faculties, to face facts honestly, unhampered by prudery, convention, or the doctrines of the Church. And then they will see for themselves that the Great Unrest is a force, the direction of which, for good or ill, lies in their own hands. And according to the way they fulfil the responsibility entailed upon ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... sheets of this edition were passing through the press, a violent attack was made in a newspaper correspondence on the morality of Tom Jones by certain notorious advocates of Purity, as some say, of Pruriency and Prudery combined, according to less complimentary estimates. Even midway between the two periods we find the admirable Miss Ferrier, a sister of Fielding's own craft, who sometimes had touches of nature and satire not far ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... learn the vanity of such an attempt. He could not go to them, nor would they return to him. He could only pretend to bridge the gulf by the exercise of a suave diplomacy, and by carefully banishing from his manner every trace of that dispraising elderliness which seems to the young the essence of prudery arising, like an appalling Phoenix, from the ashes of past imprudence. In this way he drew a little nearer to Julian, who obviously feared at first to suffer condemnation at his hands, but, finding only geniality, lost his uneasiness and suffered himself to ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... impulse surged through her whole being, bidding her imperiously to abandon her ultra-conscientious loyalty to a woman she had never seen. Why struggle against circumstance? If death were so near, what did she gain by prudery? ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... G—— reflected upon a lady for prudery, and was going on, when Sir Charles, interrupting her, said, Take care, Lady G——. You, ladies, take care; for I am afraid, that MODESTY, under this name, will become ignominious, and be banished the hearts, at least the behaviour and conversation, of all those whose fortunes or inclinations ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... male students, and there are apparently more women than men who copy the pictures in the Louvre. Nothing is more pleasing than to see these gentle creatures, with their easels, sitting before a colossal Rubens or a Madonna of Raphael. No difficulty alarms them, and prudery is not allowed to give a voice ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various |
