English girl

“ A sturdy little English girl, rather short for her age, with rosy cheeks and bright intelligent brown eyes, that glance here, there, and everywhere; long light-brown hair, tied back from her face with a blue ribbon, that matches in colour the blue serge dress she wears. The face has a bright, open expression, and the girl's whole appearance speaks of the happy, peaceful life she leads. ”

“ I had with me a lovely girl, whose truly English style of beauty, her brilliant bloom, heightened by her eager animation, her lips dimpled with a thousand smiles, and her whole countenance radiant with glee and mischievous archness, made her an object of admiration, which the English expressed by a fixed stare, and the Italians by sympathetic smiles, nods, and all the usual superlatives of delight. ”

“ I have no doubt of this, that one reason why the Englishwoman is a success is that she starts as a31 good little English girl, or even a bad one. No little girl in the world is so attractive, not the overdressed bébé, all ribbons and laces, of the French, not the dumpy product of the German, not the pallid bambina of the Italian, and least of all the spoilt little horror of the American. ”

“ In the near future, it seems probable, the English girl will enter bachelorhood as fully and as regularly as an English boy. The old idea of its being unsettling or harmful is quickly passing away. English girls in general are nearly as capable of looking after themselves as their brothers, nor are they more likely than they to withstand the attractions of matrimony when they are offered. In the meantime they will prove themselves of value to society in some definite activity, instead of going shopping, arranging flowers and staying about indefinitely in other people’s houses. ”

“ To the last the English woman remains a sociable being with whom one could potentially set off with on a walking tour, an inconceivable enterprise with a French one or an Italian, who have learnt the grammar of passion and of its imitations young, to be obsessed with it always, while the English girl has been absorbing the grammar of health, of goodfellowship and of games. ”

“ Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk there must be hidden the modest, slender, violet-nature of a girl, whom an alien mass of earthliness has unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden in her teens, though very seldom so pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded leaves, and tender womanhood shielded by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or other, our American girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable moment. ”

“ She is moderate in her aspirations, requiring less excitement than an English girl; and never forgetting the solid necessities of life,—as they are so often forgotten here in England. In associating with young men, an English girl will always remember that in each one she so meets she may find an admirer whom she may possibly love, or an admirer whom she may probably be called on to repel. ”

“ To this day, a great lady, accustomed to company, blushes in the presence of an unknown man, and feels bashful like a little girl: the blue eyes are dropped, and a child-like shame flies to her rosy cheeks. Englishwomen have not the smartness, the boldness of ideas, the assurance of bearing, the precocity, which with the French make of a young girl, in six months, a woman of intrigue and the queen of a drawing-room. ”

“ And if this is true of our English girls, still more would it be true of the American girl, who has a unique position and influence of her own, and is dowered with that peculiar capacity and graciousness which seem to belong by divine right to the American woman. ”

“ One characteristic of the education of English girls is the thoroughness with which every branch of it is carried out; there is no shirking, no compromise. What they learn is learned thoroughly, and any one conversing with a well-educated English girl of the class of which I write, will find it very difficult to get her out of her depth. Many girls carry on their studies long after they have done with the school-room and their reading is wide and diversified ”

“ The young ladies certainly bore some resemblance to the type of American girl which one never fails to meet in travelling. They were dressed in the height of the fashion, pretty with the delicate evanescent beauty of too many of our girls, and all gifted with the load voices, shrill laughter, and free-and-easy manners which so astonish decorous English matrons and maids. ”

“ No one can say of the modern English girl that she is tender, loving, retiring or domestic. The old fault so often found by keen-sighted Frenchwomen, that she was so fatally romanesque, so prone to sacrifice appearances and social advantages for love, will never be set against the Girl of the Period. ”

“ To point to economic pressure here, and to say that the English girl is more hard pressed than the French girl, would be entirely false. It is much more difficult, as a matter of fact, for a French girl than for an English girl to find a husband.
The truth of the matter is that the French girl is very [Pg 94] much more positive to Life and therefore to man, than the English girl. The latter can frequently not only be happy without man; but she will boast of the fact—applaud, that is to say, her negativeness, her nothingness! ”

“ The green of the grass and the splendid complexion of your girls are the two things which first strike the American visiting England. Both of these, we are told, are [Pg 105] due to the climate, and this doubtless is a fact, for when an American girl has been in England a short time the colour comes to her cheeks, only to disappear on her return to her native land. Another thing we admire is the English girl's figure. American girls are either slim as compared with English girls, or else very stout. We have not the happy medium of the daughters of England. ”

“ Of late years we have changed the pattern, and have given to the world a race of women as utterly unlike the old insular ideal as if we had created another nation altogether. The Girl of the Period, and the fair young English girl of the past, have nothing in common save ancestry and their mother-tongue; and even of this last the modern version makes almost a new language, through the copious additions it has received from the current slang of the day. ”

“ I do not say this in any spirit of hostility to the English girl, because I have travelled England and Scotland, and am aware that very large numbers of British girls are positive and extremely positive to Life and to man; it is, however, unfortunately true that negativeness is on the increase—hence the almost amazing liberty that is granted, and every year more readily granted, to the English girl in her intercourse with young men. ”

“ If the young girl has no other beauty, the look I speak of is a sufficient charm; but when it is united, as it so often is, to real perfection of feature and color, the result is the most beautiful thing in nature. It makes the highest type of English beauty, and to my sense there is nothing better than that. Not long since I heard a clever foreigner indulge, in conversation with an English lady—a very wise and liberal woman—in a little lightly restrictive criticism of her countrywomen. ”

“ Little French girls, for all the superficial strictness of their bringing up, are, apparently, never allowed to look on the world with any other eyes than the eyes of the woman. Our English girls learn to do this quickly enough, but at least they are allowed to begin their lives in perfect innocence. If they pay for this by seldom acquiring the last fine shade of attractive femininity, they gain in the frankness and fearlessness which are the gift of our incomparable English nursery ways. ”

“ My friend who gave me the two letters of introduction says it will: that Americans love English girls, if they have the courage to come over. She says there are heaps more chances as well as heaps more room for us in that country than there are at home. ”

“ Yes, that is so, and it is noticeable more particularly in her headgear, which she wears well over her eyes; in fact the higher she is in the social scale, the more tilted is her hat. One thing the American girls do envy is the healthy, fresh, clear complexion of the English girl. ”

“ It is an interesting fact that in France, where positiveness among girls is ever so much more general than in England, the old maid is universally unbearable, and is proverbially known to be so.
(2) But there are other agencies at work in modern society for reducing the positive English girl to negativeness, besides the unfortunate and often inevitable circumstances of an all-too-long wait. For, in England, there is extraordinarily little care taken of the female body. ”

“ To the Englishman, woman is a creature whom he looks down upon as a frail and frivolous being, greatly inferior to himself. With what an air of sovereign condescension the English schoolboy tells his young girl friends all about the game of football or cricket, in which he has taken part! ”

“ There is, of course, a widespread impression in England that American women as a rule are not womanly. The average American girl acquires when young a self-possession and an ability to converse in company which Englishwomen only, and then not always, acquire much later in life. Therefore the American girl appears, to English eyes, to be "forward," and she is assumed to possess all the vices which go with "forwardness" in an English maiden. ”

“ And the thought of that young girl, the angel of her presence in the midst of the furnace, kept that young man unspotted from the world through all the gutters of Paris life. Could not our sweet English and American girls be to their brothers what that young French girl was to hers? ”

“ We English girls, who have lived with stern fathers, and with no mother for the best part of our lives, seem to learn by intuition, the saddest phases of a life's experience. We personify the heroes of our old books, until the worst of written fates, become as natural to us as though such had been items of our own existence. ”

“ My own belief, founded mainly on observation of English girls, is, that in quickness of intellect they in no way fall behind their brothers, and that during one or two hours’ study of any subject they would be quite able to keep up with them, but that after a certain time their physical powers flag,—sooner perhaps than those of boys,—and that a long continued strain is apt to be injurious to them. ”

“ But unfortunately a girl of twenty is too apt to look faded and haggard; and a woman who with us would be in her bloom at thirty, looks passée, wrinkled, and old. It is then that the sylph-like form assumes an unpleasant angularity, suggestive of weariness and care. It is remarkable, however, that ladies of recent English extraction, under exactly the same circumstances, retain their good looks into middle life, and advancing years produce embonpoint, instead of angularity. I was very agreeably surprised with the beauty of the young ladies of New York ”

“ In quite different ways these two sisters are lovable English girls, so charming and graceful that they find additional lovers with every reader of the book. The man, belonging to a different class, is a son of the wild country, with a drive in his temperament which is like a torrent. ”

“ They generally will yield to external influences. English girls, though they become the most loving wives in the world, do not generally become so riven by an attachment as to become deep sufferers when it is disallowed. ”

“ She will be forced to assume, possibly, a greater responsibility, but that is a penalty rather than a pleasure. Let us at any rate give her the credit of reaching consciously a greater seriousness of outlook whether she has to fend for herself or not. Frivolity in its worst sense is not a fault of64 English girls. Fond as they are of enjoyment and unimaginative as they are in their pleasures, they all take life with a measure of earnestness. ”

“ If one resolutely goes on scraping off the man-made chalk from the manners and actions of English women, one is frequently rewarded with the pleasure of arriving at last at the woman behind the chalk. This is more especially the case in women of the higher classes. The only time in England I felt something of that painful bliss that mortals call love, was in the case of a lady friend of mine who, under mountains of London clay, hid away a passionate, loving woman. ”

“ The most censorious foreigner caught by the radiation of an Englishwoman within her own four walls could not come away unmelted. Like the nightly twinkle of ships’ lights on the dark chilly waters of a harbour innumerable English hearths stud the external coldness of our country with spots of warmth and brightness. The genial fire is tended by the Englishwoman, the paragon of vestal domesticity. ”

“ It has been said that Englishwomen dress better in full evening dress than in what is known as demi-toilette. I cannot think so. It is not the English dress that then looks better, but the Englishwoman; that is, if she has fine shoulders, breasts, and arms. It is the beauty that is revealed, the woman pure and simple, that pleases the eye, just as is the case elsewhere. For the things that an Englishwoman will put on, or put half-off herself, in the evening, are amazing to behold. ”

“ Let us now consider, if there is any further reason why England should not be brought as an example, which Arabia, or the East in general, are to follow.
Women in England are commonly capable of child-bearing at fourteen, let the other term be forty-eight, when they bear no more; thirty-four years, therefore, an English woman bears children. At the age of fourteen or fifteen they are objects of our love; they are endeared by bearing us children after that time, and none I hope will pretend, that, at forty-eight and fifty, an English woman is not an agreeable companion. ”