"Womanhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... peasant—Teresa, her foster-mother—had come with her from Mantua, and from Teresa alone she received such affection as she had ever known. A mere animal affection, however, which lost its value as she grew into womanhood. ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... loved and lost, he decides to adopt her. And he does; they are seen leaving together, the child being turned over to its new guardian in the most off-hand way imaginable. Of course, later, the child, having grown to womanhood, falls in love with and marries her guardian; but in real life how little chance there would be of a foundling institution's giving one of its girl charges over to a young bachelor in this informal manner, if, indeed, ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... lips, at times so vivid that it seemed artificial, and their sinuous, sensitive curve indicated a temperament that was frankly proclaimed in her figure—sensuous, graceful, slender—the figure of girlhood in its perfection and of perfect womanhood, too—like those tropical flowers that look innocent and young and fresh, yet stir in the beholder passionate longings and visions. Her walk was worthy of face and figure—free and firm and graceful, the small head ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... to bed and prepare, by a good long sleep, for the excitements and dangers of to-morrow night. Do not fear for Estella. She has ceased to be a child. In an hour she has risen to the full majesty of her womanhood." ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... a time for all things, and I must feel it unworthy of thy womanhood to so perversely jeer and flout at a good man's love, when 't ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... probably agree that womanhood is under shameful tyranny in the shops and mills. I want to destroy this tyranny. They (the Feminists) want to destroy womanhood.' They do this by attempting to drive women into the world and turn them away from the home. This is what is wrong with ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... between him and that memory as he stepped into that enchanted land for the second time. The sweet figure of young womanhood to which he had turned his boyish soul in hopeless worship, when it should have been busied rather with birds' nests and rabbit-snares, had, it is true, come to him in dimmer outline each Spring, but with magic the deeper for that. As the form faded from the silver ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... illustrated this phase of womanhood in England, in his small picture painted for the Earl of Charlemont, and entitled 'Picquet, or Virtue in Danger.' It shows a young lady, who, during a tete-a-tete, had just lost all her money to a handsome officer of her own age. He is represented in the act of returning her ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... nun is but a veil assumed in loving obedience to him, to conceal the deep-hearted, faithful, devoted flesh-and-blood woman. And such a woman! It may well be doubted if, for all that constitutes genuine womanhood, she ever had an equal. If there is salvation in love, Heloise is in the heaven of heavens. She does not try to express her love in poems, as Mrs. Browning did; but her simple, straightforward expression of a ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the brightness of her youth. At an age when the women of a higher culture are still at the height of their charm and attractiveness the woman of the Hurons had degenerated into a shrivelled hag, horrible to the eye and often despicable in character. The inborn gentleness of womanhood had been driven from her breast by ill-treatment. Not even the cruelest of the warriors surpassed the unhallowed fiendishness of the withered squaw in preparing the torments of the stake and in shrieking her toothless ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... it? Don't be ridiculous, please,' begged the bashful lover, eager, but afraid of this sharp-tongued bit of womanhood. ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... that—the ruling of men by her beauty and her clever determination. Now she imagined herself no longer possessing but entirely possessed; no longer commanding, but utterly obedient. What a new experience that would be! All the capricious womanhood of her seemed to be alert and tingling at the mere thought of it. Instead of having slaves, to be ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... members of the board and committee by consultation with members of the National Commission, officials of the Exposition Company, and heads of departments, held out for what they considered the full rights of the nominating power of the board, with the hope of bringing American womanhood in touch, as near as possible, with ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... follow such advice by bringing forward those qualities of colonial womanhood which have made for the refinement, the intellectuality, the spirit, the aggressiveness, and withal the genuine womanliness of the present-day American woman. As the book is not intended for scholars alone, the author has felt free when he had ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... and make me stronger every day; while your deepening womanhood is my daily enjoyment. You give me an opportunity to know myself, and that there are many holy relations between men ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... day. The younger had commenced practising the same delicate and ingenious craft of embroidery, and the two pursued their industry in company under the same employer. It was amusing to mark the demure assumption of womanhood darkening the brows of the aerial little sprite, as, with all the new-born consequence of responsibility, she walked soberly by her sister's side, frame in hand, and occasionally revealed to passers-by a brief glimpse of her many-coloured ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... I know very little of women, but of one thing I am morally certain: If the front seats of Paradise are not reserved for women, I am willing to take a back seat with them. It seems to me that every man who had a mother should have a proper regard for womanhood. My own mother was a combination of all the best elements of the high character that belong to true wife and motherhood. Her devotion and friendship were as eternal as the very stars of heaven, and no misfortune could dwarf her generous impulses or curdle the milk of human kindness in her good heart. ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... highs, daughter of my paternal uncle and we twain were brought up in one house; for her father was dead and before his death, he had agreed with my father that I should marry her. So when I reached man's estate and she reached womanhood, they did not separate her from me or me from her, till at last my father spoke to my mother and said, "This very year we will draw up the contract of marriage between Aziz and Azizah." So having agreed upon this he betook ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... very easy to acquire craving not only for sweets, but for condiments and highly seasoned and spiced foods and for foods of decided and contrasting flavor. As previously explained, such foods used excessively are harmful. It is especially necessary that a girl growing into womanhood use foods which furnish building and energy- giving nutrients in sufficient quantity as well ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... I have created hero and heroine, placing them in their primitive and natural characters, with aid more from life than books,—from courage the one, from affection the other—amidst the feeble Hermaphrodites of our sickly civilisation;—examples of resolute Manhood and tender Womanhood. ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more than evens up on the children. If ever there was a land where legislation on the subject of child labor is needed, it is here. Children are overworked from infancy. They do much of the work of the Islands, and the last drop of energy and vitality is gone before they reach manhood or womanhood. Indeed, the first privilege of manhood to them is ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... either her peace of mind or my own duty:—'It is a grating thing, said she, for the parents of a child, who delighted in her in all the time of her helpless infancy, and throughout every stage of her childhood; and in every part of her education to womanhood, because of the promises she gave of proving the most grateful and dutiful of children; to find, just when the time arrived which should crown their wishes, that child stand in the way of her own happiness, and her parents' comfort,and, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... of this sufficing joy. At my age no worldly interests distracted my heart; no ambitions blocked the stream of a love which flowed like a torrent, bearing all things on its bosom. Later, we love the woman in a woman; but the first woman we love is the whole of womanhood; her children are ours, her interests are our interests, her sorrows our greatest sorrow; we love her gown, the familiar things about her; we are more grieved by a trifling loss of hers than if we knew we had lost everything. This is the sacred love that ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... Fortune," and a Life of Charles V., the latter composed at the request of Philip the Good of Burgundy. But the work which sets off her wit and learning to the best advantage was an allegorical essay on Womanhood, which she called "Le Trsor de la Cit des Dames." Altogether her works include fifteen books and about sixty smaller writings, which she dedicated to the King and Queen of France, the Dukes of ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... profoundly impatient of all this to do and bother. For wasn't the whole affair, very much of a storm in a teacup, petty, paltry, quite unworthy of prolonged discussion such as this? She certainly thought so, in her youthful fervour and inexperience; while—the push of awakening womanhood giving new colour and richness to her conception of life—nature cried out for a certain extravagance in heroism, in largeness of action of aspiration. She was athirst for noble horizons, in love with beauty, with the magnificence of things, seen and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... dewy grass and the beat of the horse-hoofs rang out clearer and clearer, Katherine was aware that the dear vision faded and grew faint. As it had come, softly, without amazement or fear, so it departed, without agitation or sadness of farewell, leaving Katherine profoundly consoled, the glory of her womanhood restored to her in the indubitable assurance that what had been of necessity ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Fiction in the clean hands of that king of romancers, Sir Walter Scott, threw new light on the history and scenes of the past. Such characters as "Jennie Deans" and her godly father might have been taken from John Banyan's portrait gallery; Lady Di Vernon is the ideal of young womanhood. Fiction has often been a wholesome relief to a good man's overworked and weary brain. Many of the recent popular novels are wholesome in their tone and the historical type often instructive. The ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... uncompromising, while Frank paid no more attention to his sister than if she were a hired servant in the house. Only the girl's firm determination, awakened womanhood, patience and Christian fortitude enabled her to accept her lot. But in spite of the daily reproaches, stern coldness and studied contempt, she went steadily forward in her purpose to regain the place she had lost; and somehow, ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... had been eminently successful, entailing consequences, indeed, she was far from anticipating. For Stanley Sinclair had waked to the fact that he was the father of a beautiful girl on the verge of womanhood, and his sense of parental responsibility, long before drugged, manacled and locked into a dark cell, had roused at last and was clamoring to be free from its prison. Annabel, his wife, had recognized a possible rival in her own household. And lastly, Thad West ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... Papadopoulos, and her own remarkable capacity, she acquired a very complete and comprehensive education. When but eleven years old, she composed a charming little story, and before she had reached womanhood, undertook a translation of the Iliad. She showed no inclination for the frivolous amusements of a frivolous society. Her view of life and its responsibilities was a serious one, and she addressed all her energies to the work of self-improvement and self-culture. She read and re-read the literary ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... at one of the myriad windows of the ——- Hotel, and remained there as if fascinated by the miracle of sunrise over the sea. Under her simplicity of character and girlish merriment Debby possessed a devout spirit and a nature full of the real poetry of life, two gifts that gave her dawning womanhood its sweetest charm, and made her what she was. As she looked out that summer dawn upon the royal marriage of the ocean and the sun, all petty hopes and longings faded out of sight, and her young ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... years old he went to the old Bentley place to live. His mother, Louise Bentley, the girl who came into the world on that night when Jesse ran through the fields crying to God that he be given a son, had grown to womanhood on the farm and had married young John Hardy of Winesburg, who became a banker. Louise and her husband did not live happily together and everyone agreed that she was to blame. She was a small woman with sharp grey eyes and black hair. From childhood she had been ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... better for him to come to Paris with you." And when he admitted that he was afraid of Paris for them, she laughed at his fears, called him a provincial, for she was full of affection for the city where she was born, where she had grown chastely to womanhood, and which gave her in return the vivacity, the natural refinement, the sprightly good-humor which make one think that Paris, with its rains, its fogs, its sky which is no sky, is the true fatherland of woman, whose nerves it spares and whose patient ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... guiltily, "I acknowledge that I have always had a peculiar aversion to red hair; but, truly, hers is an unusual shade—not a flaming, staring red, but deep and rich. I never saw anything just like it before. Anyhow, she is a magnificent, specimen of womanhood. See! what a queenly carriage! what a figure!" and his glance followed the ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... had much acquaintance together. A disposition naturally simple and demanding protection; a long course of poverty and humility, of daily privations, and hard words, of kind offices and no returns, had been her lot ever since womanhood almost, or since her luckless marriage with George Osborne. You who see your betters bearing up under this shame every day, meekly suffering under the slights of fortune, gentle and unpitied, poor, and rather despised for their poverty, do you ever step down from ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... world loves to play. In childhood, it is the very language of life. In youth, it vies with the sterner business of young manhood or womanhood. When we are older and the days of childhood are but a fading memory, we still have some "hobby" that offers recreation from our business and social duties. It may be golf or tennis or billiards; but it is play—and it is ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... Englishmen? What have they brought of growth and grace Since mud-built London by its fen Became the Briton's breeding-place? What of the Village, where our blood Was brewed by sires, half man, half brute, In vessels of wild womanhood, From blood ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... was,—with some emphasis and spirit too. She seemed to have slipped back from sedate and dignified young womanhood to mere flippant girlishness and not to have gained appreciably by the transition. Preciosa McNulty, still a girl and giving no immediate promise of developing into anything more, shared with her the over-cushioned disorder of the ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... she, her, female, petticoat. feminality^, muliebrity^; womanhood &c (adolescence) 131. womankind; the sex, the fair; fair sex, softer sex; weaker vessel. dame, madam, madame, mistress, Mrs. lady, donna belle [Sp.], matron, dowager, goody, gammer^; Frau [G.], frow^, Vrouw [Du.], rani; good woman, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... entered Dr. Melmoth's habitation, the sunny days seemed brighter and the cloudy ones less gloomy, than he had ever before known them. He naturally delighted in children; and Ellen, though her years approached to womanhood, had yet much of the gayety and simple happiness, because the innocence, of a child. She consequently became the very blessing of his life,—the rich recreation that he promised himself for hours of literary toil. On one occasion, indeed, he even ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... young Fitzgerald first saw her, had hardly attained that incipient stage of womanhood which justifies a mother in taking her out into the gaieties of the world. She was then only sixteen; and had not in her manner and appearance so much of the woman as is the case with many girls of that age. She was shy and ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... mansions, parks, and farms great and small, scattered through several counties, he is the greatest radical in England. He distances the Chartists altogether in his programme, and adds several new points to their political creed. He not only advocates manhood suffrage, but womanhood suffrage, and woman-seats in Parliament. Then he is a great friend of a reform which the Chartists grievously overlook, and which would make thousands of them voters if they would adopt it. That is, Total Abstinence from Tobacco, as well ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... up in her father's house, her natural virtues grew too: beauty, charm, and modesty. And thus she became a young woman. Now in her young womanhood she was asked in marriage not only by great merchants, but even by kings. But she was prudent and did not like men. She would not have loved a god if he had been her husband. She was ready to die at merely hearing talk of her marriage. So her father was silent on the subject, ...
— Twenty-two Goblins • Unknown
... relationship grown more whimsical and more restless, showing new phases of frivolity and shallowness to the world, had deepened and developed, under Chris's eyes, into her own highest possibility of womanhood. To him she was earnest, honest, only anxious to be good and to be true. He knew the viewpoint of that wiser self that was the real Norma; he knew how wide open those blue eyes were to what was false and worthless in ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... he was called in 1726, at the age of twenty-three, to the church at Northampton. There he was ordained February 15, 1727, and thither a few months later he brought his "espoused saint," Sarah Pierpont, consummate flower of Puritan womanhood, thenceforth the companion not only of his pastoral cares and sorrows, but of his seraphic contemplations of ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... it fears not change; enter thou in, Flower of all sweet and stainless womanhood! For ever to grow ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... had wholly passed from her manner. She was eager and ingenuous as a child. And yet there was something in her—a depth of feeling, a concentration half-revealed—that made him aware of her womanhood. She was never confidential with him, but yet he felt her confidence ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... legitimate criticism of German methods is that they pushed to extremes of barbarity premisses which were commonly admitted and could logically lead in no other direction. The old restriction of war to a few actual combatants disappeared as manhood took to universal service, womanhood to munition-making, and whole nations to war-work, and as the reach of artillery and aircraft extended the sphere of operations hundreds of miles behind the battle-lines. Eighteen were killed at Scarborough, mostly women and children, and 70 were wounded; Whitby had 3 killed and ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... place in Spenser. We have seen her above associated with the other peculiar virtues of womanhood. ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... discovery. That was not love. ... Perhaps there may have been a touch of the maternal passion about her feeling for this man. ... Nothing else—nothing more than that, and the eternal indefinable charity for all boys which is inherent in all womanhood—the consciousness of the enchantment that a boy has for all women. ... Nothing more. ... Except that—perhaps she had wondered whether he liked her—as much as she liked him.... Or if, possibly, in his regard for her there were some slight depths between shallows—a ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... sweetest of housekeepers yet; Up when the roses in golden light peep, Helping her mother to sew and to sweep. Tidy and prim in her apron and gown, Brightest of eyes, of the bonniest brown; Tiniest fingers, and needle so fleet, Pattern of womanhood, down ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... shoulders and looked at her placid back, which, indeed, she gave him unceremoniously enough, with a hopeless contempt. Womanhood had earned, it appeared, his profoundest scorn as unbusinesslike and ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... nothing but good; the faithful old heart will yearn to love and serve. And yet I shall know she knows the standard, just as I know it; I shall know she remembers the ideal of gentle, tender, Christian womanhood, just as I remember it; and I must not, I dare not, fall short. Believe me, Miss Champion, more than once, when physical attraction has been strong, and I have been tempted in the worship of the outward loveliness to disregard or ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... the period of puberty in girls is more rigidly adhered to than any ancient religious rite or social custom in vogue among the Apache. By this ceremony the social position of the girl is established, and she is given assurance, on the eve of her womanhood, of a long, happy, active life. At this critical period, if the favor of the gods were not thus invoked in behalf of the girl, it might augur ill for ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... of chestnut hair, hatless, at the mercy of the mood of the breeze, to him seemed like a ruddy halo crowning a face of a childlike purity. Her gentle gray eyes were to him unfathomable wells of innocence, while her lips had all the ripeness of a delicious womanhood. ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... infinite variety which custom could not stale. Himself a second and a yet more fortunate Antony, he has once more laid a world, and a world more wonderful than ever, at her feet. He has put aside for her sake all other forms and figures of womanhood; he, father or creator of Rosalind, of Cordelia, of Desdemona, and of Imogen, he too, like the sun-god and sender of all song, has anchored his eyes on her whom "Phoebus' amorous pinches" could not leave "black," nor "wrinkled deep in time"; on that incarnate and imperishable "spirit ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... these accusations are not disproved. They are generally believed. It is clear, therefore, that something more effectual than universal manhood suffrage is needed to stem the torrent. And it is simply ridiculous to suppose that womanhood suffrage can effect the same task. Who can believe that where men, in their own natural field, have partially failed to preserve a healthful political atmosphere, an honest political practice, that women, so much less experienced, ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... All womanhood is holy! it shall not be profaned! Our sanctity is threatened: Men! it shall not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... her, then rubbed his eyes and looked at her again. In some subtle way she had changed, or he had, since they last met. Never before had he thought of her as a woman; she had been merely another individual to whom he liked to talk. To-day her womanhood carried its own appeal. She was not beautiful and no one would ever think her so, but she was sweet and wholesome and had a new, indefinable freshness about her that, in another woman, ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... pretty figure as she stood in the window, tall, lithe, and graceful, with the long soft curves of budding womanhood. Her face was sweet rather than beautiful, but an artist would have revelled in the delicate strength of the softly rounded chin, and the quick bright play of her expression. Her hair, of a deep rich brown, with a bronze shimmer where a sunbeam lay athwart it, swept back in those thick luxuriant ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... an image of the beauty of a new order of godlike men, that drained an Indian Bacchus of his thin seductions at a breath-reduced him to the state of nursery plaything, spangles and wax, in the contemplation of a girl suddenly plunged on the deeps of her womanhood. She shrank to smaller and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... where every day for many years she had walked, spring and summer, autumn and winter; days of rain, days of sun, days of boisterous wind, days of white feathery snow—all the days through which she had passed, on her way from childhood to womanhood. Best of all, she had loved the garden and her favourite path in spring, when vague hopes like dreams stirred in her blood, when it seemed that she could hear the whisper of the sap in the veins of the trees, and the crisp stir of the buds as they unfolded. She wished that she could have ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... a shock to the religious or to the moral sentiments. "Cain" and "Manfred" are regarded as almost blasphemous, though probably not so meant to be by the poet, in view of the stirring questions of Grecian tragedy; while the longest of his poems, "Don Juan," is an insult to womanhood and a disgrace to genius; for although containing some of the most exquisite touches of description and finest flights of poetic feeling, its theme is along the lowest ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... style, description, elaboration, interpretation, and development of the story are new. Ihave arbitrarily laid the scene in England, under purely idealized conditions; and have initiated nearly all that the poem contains of womanhood, of love, of religion, of state-policy, and of domestic life and manners. It is clear, therefore, that my work must not be judged either as a translation, version, or paraphrase of ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... know!" she remarked aloud. She was thinking, with the tolerance of mature womanhood: 'I could have tamed the brute in the other one. At least he was a man!' "Well, we dream our dreams, sentimental little girls that we are! And after a time we open our eyes like kittens on life. I have opened mine, Larry,—very wide open. ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... apologies. Why should not they travel to Brighton on the Friday evening and draw solace for their weary souls from a Saturday, Sunday, and possibly Monday, at Brighton? Madame became a frozen statue of offended womanhood! What, mon Dieu, had she done that he should conceive her to be a light woman? She, the never-to-be-comforted widow of the incomparably gallant hero of anthracite stoves and le Grand Couronne. She had been too unsuspicious, too trustful; their pleasant acquaintance must end upon ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... a beautiful sight, the three young girls just bursting into womanhood, with their earnest and pure natures, ministering to the faint old man who was fast wasting away from this earthly being. Henry and his friend were deeply impressed by it, and dreaded to disturb so charming a ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... develop full manhood. This was followed by a period of silence, which has practically extended to recent times. Both of these systems are pernicious. We know that sexual intercourse is not necessary to the development of mature normal manhood or womanhood. On the contrary, we know that continence, not incontinence, is an absolute essential to the growth of full sexual, virile maturity, as well as to the growth of efficient ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... features. Unfortunately, the lower part of the face marred that expression of sweetness; the jaw was prominent, and the lips, rather too full, showed almost blood-like over the strong white teeth. There was here, like a flash of passion, something that spoke of awakening womanhood, still unconscious of itself amidst those other traits ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... She was of about the average size of womanhood as we see it embodied now, but her waist was not compressed at an unseemly angle, and much resembled in its contour that of the Venus of Milo which has become such a stock example of the healthfully symmetrical. Her hair was brown and long. It was innocent ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... bearing in mind the danger of the present tendencies, he can do much to change the current. Let us hope that we shall again see the day when thoughtful motherhood shall be considered the highest function of womanhood, and to shirk this natural duty will ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... few strange words of the woman of Israel, Kenkenes had caught the name of Har-hat. This then was the bearer of the king's fan—this insulter of age and womanhood. And the words of Mentu seemed very ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... Frankie stood, In the dear pride of womanhood, The queen of Elfindale; One sought her for her loveliness— A joy—a heaven of happiness— An earth-born angel meant to bless My throbbing soul with rich excess Of joys that never fail. She sat hid in a garden bower, Watching the first, sweet star, That crowns the lovely twilight hour, And glows ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... awakened by Rosinska who on that day had come earlier to the dressing-room, for she was to begin the play. When she saw the sleeping girl, the older actress was moved to pity. The remaining shreds of her womanhood covered by the artificiality of theatrical life, awoke in her at the sight of that pale face, worn ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... Mademoiselle Cormon used every means to attain her end; and that among the legitimate lures of womanhood she devoted herself to dress, wore low-necked gowns, and employed the negative coquetries of a magnificent display of arms. Not at all! She was as heroic and immovable in her high-necked chemisette as a sentry in his box. Her gowns, bonnets, and chiffons were ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... women's powers. The Professor said he did not believe in their ever succeeding in a competition with men. Then he went on:—] "I can't help looking at women with something of the eye of a physiologist. Twenty years ago I thought the womanhood of England was going to the dogs," [but now, he said, he observed a wonderful change for the better. We asked to what he attributed it. Was it to lawn tennis and the greater variety of bodily exercises?] "Partly," [he answered,] "but much more to their having ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... Doctor, without sense of religion, with only a fitful tenderness, with years' length between the fits, so fiercely critical, so wholly unradiant of hope, misanthropic, savagely morbid. Yes; there was little Elsie too; it must have been that she was the boy's preserver, being childhood, sisterhood, womanhood, all that there had been for him of human life, and enough—he being naturally of such good stuff—to keep him good. He had lost much, but not all: he was not nearly what he might have been under better auspices; flaws and imperfections there were, in abundance, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hand; her sudden disappearance, and the mad pursuit, which terminated by casting him insensible at Ronald's door, and brought to his succor one who not only watched beside him with all the devotion of a brother, mingled with the tenderness of womanhood itself, but whose buoyant, healthy tone of mind had infused new hope and vigor into a broken, despondent, ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... bushes close beside the path, a tall, slender form stood forth, the lissome figure of a girl in the budding charm of womanhood. There was a lithe, curving beauty in the lines that the scant homespun gown outlined so clearly. The swift movement by which she revealed herself was instinct with grace. As she rested motionless, with arms extended in a gesture of appeal, there was a singular dignity ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... and white of her colouring. Her features were delicately chiselled, and her face had that peculiar fresh, innocent, soft, untouched bloom and undisturbed repose which form the special charm and glory of the first dawn of womanhood. Her little head was well poised on a slender neck, just now curving a little to one side with the fatigue of the hours during which it had sustained her headgear. This consisted of a tiny flat hat, fastened on by long pins, and adorned by a cluster of campanulas like those ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... jealously the weakness of self-sacrifice. Women have had the beauty of "unselfishness," and "amiability" dinned into their ears for so long that there is no depth of degradation, or of abnegation of true womanhood to which they will not descend for the sake of being so considered by those whose interest it is to keep them where they virtually endorse the vices of others by their own lack of self-justice. While we must grope along until we understand the wickedness of this, and until ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... school-girl. What is to be her situation on arriving at womanhood? Must she assume responsible stations? Have we here the germ of the conjugal tie, and the elements of maternal influence? How then can we forget these relations, and train a being fit only to bask in the beams of praise? Let not this be. Address now the same motives as you ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... Gods portrays at the opening the three norns or fates weaving and measuring the thread of destiny. It is the beginning of the end. The perfect pair, Siegfried and Brunhild, appear in all the glory of their life, splendid ideals of manhood and womanhood. But Siegfried goes out into the world to achieve deeds of prowess. He gives her the Nibelungen ring to keep as a pledge of his love till his return. Meanwhile Alberich also has begotten a son, Hagan, to achieve for him the possession of the ring. He is partly of the Gibichung ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... into his eyes, and saw that they were full of tears; but still she did not speak. Oh, Caroline Waddington, Caroline Waddington! if it had but been given thee to know, even then, how much of womanhood there was in thy bosom, of warm womanhood, how little of goddess-ship, of cold goddess-ship, it might still have been well with thee! But thou didst not know. Thou hadst gotten there at any rate thy Juno's pedestal; and having that, needs ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... companionship and careful teaching, she had grown into her share of the household duties and into a knowledge of woman's part in the life to which she belonged, as naturally as her girlish form had put on the graces of young womanhood. The things that filled the days of her father and mother, and the days of her neighbors and friends, had filled her days. The things that were all in all to those she loved had been all in all to her. And always, through those years, from ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... the gutter, she was on the point of being lost before she had reached womanhood, like fruit which spoils before it is ripe, when a man turned up who was fated to arm her for life's Struggle, and to change the vulgar thief into the accomplished monster of ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... emancipated view of things, and with cynical mockery which she mistakes for penetration, I am sorely tempted to hiss out "Petroleuse!" It is a small matter to have our palaces set aflame compared with the misery of having our sense of a noble womanhood, which is the inspiration of a purifying shame, the promise of life—penetrating affection, stained and blotted out by images of repulsiveness. These things come—not of higher education, but—of dull ignorance fostered ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... is so fruitful in comparison with Paganism, in conjugal fidelity, in female purity and in the respect paid to womanhood, these blessings are in no small measure due to the force of Mary's all-pervading influence and example. Ever since the Son of God chose a woman to be His mother man looks up to woman with ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... gracious,—clearly the speaker took it for granted that she would receive attention, and she implied her thanks abundantly beforehand. It was a voice that evoked in the imagination a charming picture of fresh, young, confident, and gracious womanhood. ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... to any special locality, it appears to have found much favor in the art of Northern Italy. In the Brescian school, Moretto was unusually fond of the subject. His treatment of the theme is somewhat heavy; there is little of the ethereal in his celestial vision, either in the type of womanhood or in the style of arrangement. In defiance of the law of gravitation, he poses his upper figures so as to form a solid pyramid, wide at the base, and tapering abruptly to ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... was law. During the last year there had been some slight change, but more, perhaps, on Mark's part than on hers. He had consulted her wishes more, had asked instead of ordered, and had begun to treat her as if conscious that she was fast growing up into womanhood. ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... clothes until he had gone back to the field. In her scant calico dress, with the furrows of age already settling about her mouth, and her pale brown hair strained in thin peaks back from her forehead, she might have stood as the world-type of toil-worn womanhood, for she was of the stuff of martyrs, and the dignity of their high resolve was her one outward grace. Life had been revealed to her as something to be endured rather than enjoyed, and the softer adornments of her sex had not withstood the daily ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... for women of my type—what may be called the intellectual siren—the lover phase is inevitable. We are goaded not only by the imperious demands of womanhood and the hope of the perfect companion, but by curiosity, love of adventure, ennui; possibly some more obscure complex—vengeance on the husband who has wrecked our first illusions—on Life itself. Bringing-up, family and social traditions, have nothing to do with ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... mind could be read in her face; she looked so heavenly, that when grown into womanhood I have, in a moment of enthusiasm, been almost tempted to fold her in my arms; but I never forgot my great mission, even in the ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... not for me. That which is fated must be; and grief is easy to those who do naught but grieve. Full of sorrow was my youth, and full of sorrow my womanhood. Full of sorrow was my youth for Bellerophon the slayer of the Chimaera, whom my father drove away by treason; and full of sorrow my womanhood, for thy treacherous father and for thee; and full of sorrow my old age will be (for I see my fate in dreams), when the sons of the Swan shall carry ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... repeated, recoiling, all my womanhood up in arms before the fearful joy expressed in her voice and attitude. "I should try and forget such a man ever existed. But I shall not be easily convinced," I continued, as I saw her lips open with a sort of eager hope terrible to witness. "You ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... gradually brought to that state of unconsciousness of any discomfort by having been subjected to this abominable process from a very tender age, and being continued each year, the waist is scarce half the natural size it should have been at womanhood. Take a country girl who has grown up free from this practice, and has a well-developed frame, and put on her the harness of her fashionable sister, and draw it to the point the latter is accustomed to wear it, and you shall see whether there ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... would no strong effort of will, no energy of heart or mind, break the bonds that held me down,—no steady perseverance of purpose win me a way out of darkness into light? No, for I was a woman, an ugly woman, whose girlhood had gone by without affection, and whose womanhood was passing without love,—a woman, poor and dependent on others for daily bread, and yet so bound by conventional duties to those around her that to break from them into independence would be to outrage all the prejudices of those who ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... his helpless victim before him. Now is his golden opportunity. He must not miss it, and he does not, and that beautiful girl who entered the dancing school as pure and innocent as an angel three months ago returns to her home that night robbed of that most precious jewel of womanhood—virtue! ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner
... Dic often went to see Tom, but talked to Tom's sister. Many an evening, long after Tom had unceremoniously climbed the rude stairway to bed, would the brown-eyed maid, with her quaint, wistful touch of womanhood, sit beside Dic on the ciphering log inside the fireplace, listening to him read from one of Billy Little's books, watching him trace continents, rivers, and mountains on a map, or helping him to cipher a complicated problem ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... visited their uncle four years had passed, and, in that time, they had shot up to womanhood, although they were not yet out of their teens. Their father was a landed proprietor living in north Northumberland; and, like other landed proprietors who live under the shade of the Cheviots, was rich in his flocks, and his herds, and his men-servants and his maid-servants, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... homes. While her distinction mainly rests on her efforts in behalf of the luckless prince Charles, after the disastrous battle of Culloden; yet, in reality, her character was strong, and she was a noble type of womanhood in her ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... confidence with which she approached and welcomed a stranger, rendered her perfectly bewitching; and to this description we may add, that, though in the florescence of youth, she was in the full bloom of womanhood. ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... disliked very much taking off her pearls. Though she could not have put the fact into words, this string of pearls was to her a symbol of her freedom, almost of her womanhood. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... from those brown eyes, showed one that she took her measurements of individuals by a gauge of her own, and that she had not that guileless trust in human nature that is supposed to belong to young womanhood. The full expression indicated an independence that seemed a breath caught from the wild beauty ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Dear wind, dear stream, dear stars, dear heart of all, White angel lying in my little boat! Strange that my boyhood's skill with sail and helm, Oft steering safely 'twixt the winding banks, Should make me rich with womanhood and life! ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... believe there are spirits wandering through space. Occasionally one of them, becoming discontented, desires to enter the world as a human being. It looks around, then selects some young woman about ready to enter womanhood, one that is noted for her virtue and other good qualities, to become its mother. Having made the selection, it awaits the opportunity and uses her as the medium for gaining its desire. In due course of time a child is born, which on ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... a lady's-maid who had just come into a legacy of a thousand pounds under the will of her late mistress. Another correspondent, Mrs. Gradinger, wrote that her German cook had announced that the dignity of womanhood was, in her opinion, slighted by the obligation to prepare food for others in exchange for mere pecuniary compensation. Only on condition of the grant of perfect social equality would she consent to stay, and Mrs. Gradinger, though she held advanced opinions, was hardly advanced ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... away from an unholy world. As a man shelters a little, flickering flame, hollowing his hands around it to keep it from the wind, as a man screens a flower from the cold, so I have striven to shelter and to screen your life, so that you might come to womanhood in such a fashion—so simple, so pure, so holy—as that in which girls grew to womanhood in the Golden Age. Therefore I did not tell you that Robert the Good was dead; therefore I did not tell you that ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... to a yard—along the strand. Some tall and stately; some tall and slender; some well developed and firm on their limbs; some gentle in attitude, even in their war dress; some defiant; perhaps forty or fifty, perhaps more, ladies; a splendid display of womanhood in the bright sunlight. Blue dresses, pink dresses, purple dresses, trimmings of every colour; a gallant show. The eye had but just time to receive these impressions as it were with a blow of the camera—instantaneous photography—when, boom! the groundswell was on ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... mist, the Judge's hideous bungalow like a fairy palace, his own parched compound like a plot of Paradise, when all was so abominable by day; and, as ever—why his darling, Lenore Stukeley, had had to marry de Warrenne and die in the full flower and promise of her beautiful womanhood. ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... me to this lovely city by the lake. I thanked Him that I had not been content to remain a burden to Max and Norah, growing sour and crabbed with the years. Those years of work and buffeting had made of me a broader, finer, truer type of womanhood—had caused me to forget my own little tragedy in contemplating the great human comedy. And so I made a little prayer there in ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... showed a fatherly solicitude toward these youths, so his wife spent upon them her unused motherly gift and feeling. She had never buried any of the ardent desires of her womanhood; she had never known sickness. In spite of the shadow of her childlessness she went on living her full, significant woman's life, and constantly defied the gnawing thoughts of what might have been by a cheerful acceptance of what life offered her. She was the daughter of a tailor, a dark ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... them, young as he was, was that of a father, as well as brother. He never wearied of devising plans for their intellectual improvement. He made it his peculiar care that they should be thoroughly educated, and that, while intellectually robust, none of the soft down and bloom of true womanhood should be brushed away in the process. They were his memory's "good angels" even in sleep; for what must have been his dreams in the midst of such surroundings, if he had not had them ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... ill-will and painful struggle. The poor soul has been, perhaps for years, fretted and wearied; or else woefully lonely, cabined, confined, and cramped almost to numbness. When, behold! by the marvellous miracle of man or womanhood—a dull, tiresome child is suddenly transformed, takes on shapeliness and stature, opens the bolted doors of life, leads the father or mother into valleys of ease and on to hopeful hilltops; slays dragons, chains ogres, and smiles with the eyes and lips which have been vaguely ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... the open friendliness. I cannot easily indicate to you the sort of feeling with which the boy had come to regard this young girl, just above him in years and thought and in the attitude which true womanhood, young or old, takes toward man. He had no sisters; he had been intimately associated with no girl-companions; he had lived with his brother and an uncle and a young aunt, Rose. Leslie Goldthwaite's kindness had drawn him into the sphere of a ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... Far-Western reverence for womanhood which I fancy challenges the most polished politeness. He remained patient, undemonstrative, self-effacing, and respectful before her, his angular arm slightly but not obtrusively advanced, the offer ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... a matter of common experience that people's ideals of manhood and womanhood vary considerably. The hardened materialist pictures perfection solely in terms of wealth, the butterfly-woman wants little but physical beauty, charm, and the qualities that attract. The sensitive man is apt to depreciate the powers he possesses and exaggerate those he lacks; while his self-satisfied ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... lips,—I think you would have taken her for more than twenty-two. There was nothing of the immature or the unfinished, nothing of the tentative, in her aspect. With no loss of freshness, there were the strength, the poise, the assurance, that we are wont to associate with a riper womanhood. Whether she looked twenty-five or not, she looked, at any rate, a completed product; she looked distinguished and worth while; she looked alive, alert: one in whom the blood coursed swiftly, the spirit burned vigorously; one who would love her pleasure, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... for the safety of the soul hovering so evenly between this world and the next. He did not ask that she might live, for if all were well hereafter he knew it was far better for her to die in her young womanhood than to live till the heart now so sad and bleeding had grown calloused with sorrow. And yet it was terrible to think of Katy dead; to know that never again would her little feet dance on the grass, or her bird-like voice break ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... distinctly entertained by him. At any rate the public, which usually saw better through the views and intentions of Pompeius than he did himself, could not be mistaken in thinking that at least with the death of the beautiful Julia— who died in the bloom of womanhood in the autumn of 700 and was soon followed by her only child to the tomb—the personal relation between her father and her husband was broken up. Caesar attempted to re-establish the ties of affinity which fate had severed; he asked for himself the hand of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... self-possession that Huss gave himself to martyrdom. As he had never abandoned the Romish Church, he calmly engaged in its functions preparatory to his death. Indeed, some touching scenes were witnessed in his prison—he unshaken—his friends, his very enemies weeping like womanhood beside him. Deputation after deputation visited him—one of them from the emperor himself—and recantation was constantly the burden of their pleading. But Huss would not recant except upon conviction; and on July 6, 1415, he appeared once more before the council, where the emperor was present ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... my wife, "we in America have so far got out of the way of a womanhood that has any vigor of outline or opulence of physical proportions, that, when we see a woman made as a woman ought to be, she strikes us as a monster. Our willowy girls are afraid of nothing so much as growing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... rim, suddenly bursts over me. Didst mark that tigerish fop? Well should I love to trap him! How soft he spoke! Ay, he purred like a cat, and all the time he stretched his claws. Didst hear the letter, too? it has an ugly sound. I know this Antony. When I was but a child, budding into womanhood, I saw him; but my eyes were ever quick, and I took his measure. Half Hercules and half a fool, with a dash of genius veining his folly through. Easily led by those who enter at the gates of his voluptuous sense; but if crossed, an iron foe. True to his friends, if, indeed, ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... not come to pass that that promise of loveliness,—of loveliness combined with innocence and full intelligence,—should be kept. How often it is that Nature is unkind to a girl as she grows into womanhood, and robs the attractive child of her charms! How often will the sparkle of early youth get itself quenched utterly by the dampness and clouds of the opening world. He knew all that,—and knew too that he had only just seen her, had barely heard the voice which ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... into my mind which I will not here set down. But even as they came the picture of Naomi's face came before me, and they departed with the swiftness of lightning. For I have found this to be true: a true love ever destroys baser and poorer loves. Let a man love truly a true, pure woman, and all womanhood is sacred to him. And because I loved Naomi truly no other love could come ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... loved him without bounds. To his companions he gave gifts with such largesse, that his horse and armour were all that at any time he called his own. Beautiful and pure as Sir Galahad, all that was brightest in womanhood ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... no formal engagement between them. Cyril seemed to shrink from the materialising of his love by any thought of marriage. To him she was an ideal of womanhood rather than a flesh-and-blood woman. His love for her was a religion; it had no taint of ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... an orphan whose parents had died when she was quite a child. I had taken her to my home, and had raised her as my own daughter. How sweet-tempered, how loving she was! She had grown to womanhood with all the attractions of her sex, and, although not a beauty in the sense usually given to that word, she was looked upon as the handsomest girl of St. Gabriel. Her soft, transparent hazel eyes mirrored her pure thoughts; her dark brown hair waved in graceful undulations ...
— Acadian Reminiscences - The True Story of Evangeline • Felix Voorhies
... up to this radiant and wise and marvellously talented womanhood of hers, to their minds, quite spontaneously. There had been a little Celia—a red-headed, sulky, mutinous slip of a girl, always at war with her step-mother, and affording no special comfort or hope to the rest of the ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... her warning. I wrote down her words and promised to heed them: "Remember, dear, that emotional desire deliberately aroused in 'harmless flirtations' and then deliberately repressed is an offense against womanhood, a menace to the health, and a degradation ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... made the somewhat narrow-sighted farmer glance outside his parish. If the rising generation of tenant farmers have lost much of the bigoted provincial mode of thought, together with the provincial pronunciation, it is undoubtedly due to the influence of the higher ideal of womanhood that now occupies their minds. And this is a good work ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... out to cover the whole idea of personality. Social well-being cannot be incompatible with individual well-being. But individual well-being has as its foundation the responsible life of the rational creature. Manhood, and Mill would emphatically add womanhood too, rests on the spontaneous development of faculty. To find vent for the capacities of feeling, of emotion, of thought, of action, is to find oneself. The result is no anarchy. The self so found ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... obedience was obtained by appealing to my love of approbation. Many years passed, bringing me to womanhood, when I discovered the truth of Nurse Katy's reason why I should not be a belle. Other people decided that my "hair was too straight, and my skin too yellow," to use Katy's homely, rough words; but her brusque admonition, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... many of the things that are old. It is a hearty and exhaustive overhauling of that part of human existence which has always been the woman's province, or rather kingdom; the play of personalities in private, the real difference between Tommy and Joe. It is right that womanhood should specialise in individuals, and be praised for doing so; just as in the Middle Ages she specialised in dignity and was praised for doing so. People put the matter wrong when they say that the novel ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... which to most girls would have been useless, but which suited Fanny's mind better than elaborate culture, was in constant progress during her passage from childhood to womanhood. The great book of human nature was turned over before her. Her father's social position was very peculiar. He belonged in fortune and station to the middle class. His daughters seemed to have been suffered to mix freely with those whom ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay |
