New Girl Books
Mar. 3rd, 2022 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerAfter I finished my college thesis (The New Girl: Reconciling Femininity and Independence in American Girls' Fiction, 1895-1915), a number of books that I had downloaded for the project languished…. for more than a decade… and I have at long last decided that their time has come! Will be reviewing them in batches till they’re all gone.
I started with The Lonesomest Doll, a short and handsomely illustrated children’s book by Abbie Farwell Brown, the friend of Josephine Preston Peabody. The lonesomest doll is a sumptuous doll that has been given to a child Queen as a present… but the doll is far too costly to be played with, and spends most of the year stuffed away in storage.
But the porter’s daughter hears of the neglected doll, and one day when she finds her father’s misplaced keys, she sneaks into the castle to play with the poor thing. “She felt as if she were living in a fairy tale. There in front of her lay the enchanted castle, with the fair Princess [the doll] waiting to be wakened from her long loneliness. And Nichette herself was the Prince, who must wake her with a kiss.”
Then Nichette and the little Queen become friends, the Queen learns how to play, and then she gets briefly kidnapped by robbers who steal all of the doll’s costliest apparel. Now the doll is no longer too expensive to play with, and Nichette and the Queen play with her every day henceforth! HAPPY END.
Then I began Harriet Eliza Paine’s Chats with Girls on Self-Culture. I have a weakness for self-help books (I believe it wasegelantier who said self-help books sell the fiction that everything will be all right? Sometimes that’s soothing), and there’s nothing as bracing as a self-help book from another time. Paine herself says it best: “the contact with minds differently trained from our own is an advantage. We discover what is real and what is merely traditional in our culture.”
The book covers a wide variety of topics: what books should you read? (Paine is aghast that many girls in this dread age of 1891 don’t like Sir Walter Scott. O tempora, o mores!) Which languages should you study? What should a dull girl do if she wants to culture herself? (I wish more self-help books included a chapter on “How to use this book if you’re basically bad at what it’s trying to teach you how to do.”) How should you choose your friends?
“The one law [of friendship] is to choose the best. But who are the best, - those who minister to us or those to whom we can minister?” Paine muses. Then, perceptively, she adds, “But what can be done about the friends that hinder? Isn’t it rather selfish, just for the sake of our own improvement, to cast off those who love us? That is the way many generous girls feel, though they may not like to say so to their parents or their teachers, who beg them to be more careful of their associates.”
Her advice is that, if you are a natural leader, then by all means feel free to try to be a good influence on those “friends that hinder.” If, on the other hand, you tend to be a follower who falls in with the ways of your closest associates, don’t fool yourself that this time the good influence you might have on your friend will outweigh the bad influence she will have on you.
However, no matter what your character, “The happiest friendships are not those where we take everything or give everything, but where we both give and take.”
And finally, I read Josephine Daskam Bacon’s Middle Aged Love Stories, which is, well, what it says on the tin. Bacon published this story collection a mere three years after Smith College Stories, which I found rather clunky, but those must have been important years for the development of her craft, for I found the characters in the later collection far better differentiated.
Like any short story collection, the quality here is variable. I think my favorite was “The Courting of Lady Jane,” wherein a middle-aged man decides he ought to get married and therefore asks his 22-year-old neighbor Jane, because he always enjoys visiting at her house so much! It’s so much fun to sit on the porch and chat with her mother! He’s so looking forward to sitting before the fire talking with her mother after the… oh wait. There will be no fireside chats with the mother? Because the mother won’t be living with them after the wedding? Oh. Oh no. Oh noooooooo…
MY DUDE YOU ARE SO STUPID but in, like, kind of an endearing way. And fortunately a young man appears at the psychological moment to capture Jane’s heart, so everyone gets paired off nicely. Happy end!
I started with The Lonesomest Doll, a short and handsomely illustrated children’s book by Abbie Farwell Brown, the friend of Josephine Preston Peabody. The lonesomest doll is a sumptuous doll that has been given to a child Queen as a present… but the doll is far too costly to be played with, and spends most of the year stuffed away in storage.
But the porter’s daughter hears of the neglected doll, and one day when she finds her father’s misplaced keys, she sneaks into the castle to play with the poor thing. “She felt as if she were living in a fairy tale. There in front of her lay the enchanted castle, with the fair Princess [the doll] waiting to be wakened from her long loneliness. And Nichette herself was the Prince, who must wake her with a kiss.”
Then Nichette and the little Queen become friends, the Queen learns how to play, and then she gets briefly kidnapped by robbers who steal all of the doll’s costliest apparel. Now the doll is no longer too expensive to play with, and Nichette and the Queen play with her every day henceforth! HAPPY END.
Then I began Harriet Eliza Paine’s Chats with Girls on Self-Culture. I have a weakness for self-help books (I believe it was
egelantier who said self-help books sell the fiction that everything will be all right? Sometimes that’s soothing), and there’s nothing as bracing as a self-help book from another time. Paine herself says it best: “the contact with minds differently trained from our own is an advantage. We discover what is real and what is merely traditional in our culture.”The book covers a wide variety of topics: what books should you read? (Paine is aghast that many girls in this dread age of 1891 don’t like Sir Walter Scott. O tempora, o mores!) Which languages should you study? What should a dull girl do if she wants to culture herself? (I wish more self-help books included a chapter on “How to use this book if you’re basically bad at what it’s trying to teach you how to do.”) How should you choose your friends?
“The one law [of friendship] is to choose the best. But who are the best, - those who minister to us or those to whom we can minister?” Paine muses. Then, perceptively, she adds, “But what can be done about the friends that hinder? Isn’t it rather selfish, just for the sake of our own improvement, to cast off those who love us? That is the way many generous girls feel, though they may not like to say so to their parents or their teachers, who beg them to be more careful of their associates.”
Her advice is that, if you are a natural leader, then by all means feel free to try to be a good influence on those “friends that hinder.” If, on the other hand, you tend to be a follower who falls in with the ways of your closest associates, don’t fool yourself that this time the good influence you might have on your friend will outweigh the bad influence she will have on you.
However, no matter what your character, “The happiest friendships are not those where we take everything or give everything, but where we both give and take.”
And finally, I read Josephine Daskam Bacon’s Middle Aged Love Stories, which is, well, what it says on the tin. Bacon published this story collection a mere three years after Smith College Stories, which I found rather clunky, but those must have been important years for the development of her craft, for I found the characters in the later collection far better differentiated.
Like any short story collection, the quality here is variable. I think my favorite was “The Courting of Lady Jane,” wherein a middle-aged man decides he ought to get married and therefore asks his 22-year-old neighbor Jane, because he always enjoys visiting at her house so much! It’s so much fun to sit on the porch and chat with her mother! He’s so looking forward to sitting before the fire talking with her mother after the… oh wait. There will be no fireside chats with the mother? Because the mother won’t be living with them after the wedding? Oh. Oh no. Oh noooooooo…
MY DUDE YOU ARE SO STUPID but in, like, kind of an endearing way. And fortunately a young man appears at the psychological moment to capture Jane’s heart, so everyone gets paired off nicely. Happy end!
no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 02:11 pm (UTC)So much this! I love this when I read Victorian moral novels, that startlingly different attitude to everything. I mean, just the phrase 'self-culture' is wonderful in what it implies.
I have no idea what it is about Walter Scott. I mean, I liked Ivanhoe fine, but I couldn't get on with Rob Roy at all, I suspect I would have made a dreadful Victorian girl.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 04:36 pm (UTC)You might have fit right in with those 1890s girls who couldn't get on with Scott! Riding around on their bicycles, wearing tailor-made blouses, using slang for goodness sake...
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Date: 2022-03-03 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 02:48 pm (UTC)Aww, this sounds so cute.
The 1890s self-help book sounds interesting! Such a very specific peek into the past.
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Date: 2022-03-03 04:38 pm (UTC)I read a lot of ~1900 self-help books for this project and I have a sneaking fondness for them, and actually did find them helpful in some ways. Probably not everybody needs to be told "It's important to pay attention to other people, actually! If you want people to like you it helps to be nice to them!" but it was useful for me.
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Date: 2022-03-03 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 11:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 11:34 pm (UTC)You might enjoy some of the other stories in this collection - particularly "A Philanthropist." (I also enjoyed "Julia the Apostate," although I must admit that it's in part because one of the characters discusses his divorce offhandedly, and you NEVER see characters in this era discuss a divorce lightly unless they are basically going to hell in a handbasket.)
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Date: 2022-03-04 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 07:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 11:30 pm (UTC)I'm assuming the young people were reading Robert Louis Stevenson or some young whippersnapper like that, while the older folks gazed on in bafflement and clutched their copies of Sir Walter Scott to their chests.
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Date: 2022-03-03 10:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-04 01:03 pm (UTC)Redistribution of wealth for the greater good! (friendship)
I am cry-laughing at the description of “The Courting of Lady Jane". Oh protagonist, you FOOL.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-04 02:32 pm (UTC)Protagonist! Truly the stupidest! Strong himbo energy, as