| <Saturday Review, 12 November 1870, 618-9>
| <GREAT GIRLS.>
| <Eliza Lynn Linton>
| <etext downloaded from Project Gutenberg with thanks>
| Nothing is more distinctive among women than the difference of
| relative age to be found between them. Two women of the same number of
| years will be substantially of different epochs of life ~~ 
| the one faded
| in person, wearied in mind, fossilized in sympathy; the other fresh
| both in face and feeling, with sympathies as broad and keen as they
| were when she was in her first youth; with a brain still as receptive,
| as quick to learn, a temper still as easy to be amused, as ready to
| love, as when she emerged from the school-room to the drawing-room.
| The one you suspect of understating her age by half-a-dozen years or
| more when she tells you she is not over forty; the other makes you
| wonder if she has not overstated hers by just so much when she
| laughingly confesses to the same age. The one is an old woman who
| seems as if she had never been young, the other <p> 'just a great girl
| yet,' </p> who seems as if she would never grow old; 
| and nothing is equal
| between them but the number of days each has lived.
| This kind of woman, so fresh and active, so intellectually as well as
| emotionally alive, is never anything but a girl; never loses some of
| the sweetest characteristics of girlhood. You see her first as a young
| wife and mother, and you imagine she has left the school-room for
| about as many months as she has been married years. Her face has none
| of that untranslatable expression, that look of robbed bloom, which
| experience gives; in her manner is none of the preoccupation so
| observable in most young mothers, whose attention never seems wholly
| given to the thing on hand, and whose hearts seem always full of a
| secret care or an unimparted joy. Brisk and airy, braving all
| weathers, ready for any amusement, interested in the current questions
| of history and society, by some wonderful faculty of organizing
| seeming to have all her time to herself as if she had no house cares
| and no nursery duties, yet these somehow not neglected, she is the
| very ideal of a happy girl roving through life as through a daisy
| field, on whom sorrow has not yet laid its hand and to whose lot has
| fallen no Dead Sea apple. And when one hears her name and style for
| the first time as a matron, and sees her with two or three sturdy
| little fellows hanging about her slender neck and calling her mamma,
| one feels as if nature had somehow made a mistake, and that our slim
| and simple-mannered damsel had only made-believe to have taken up the
| serious burdens of life, and was nothing but a great girl after all.
| Grown older she is still the great girl she was ten years ago, if her
| type of girlishness is a little changed and her gaiety of manner a
| little less persistent. But even now, with a big boy at Eton and a
| daughter whose presentation is not so far off, she is younger than her
| staid and melancholy sister, her junior by many years, who has gone in
| for the Immensities and the Worship of Sorrow, who thinks laughter the
| sign of a vacant mind, and that to be interesting and picturesque a
| woman must have unserviceable nerves and a defective digestion. Her
| sister looks as if all that makes life worth living for lies behind
| her, and only the grave is beyond; she, the great girl, with her
| bright face and even temper, believes that her future will be as
| joyous as her present, as innocent as her past, as full of love and as
| purely happy. She has known some sorrows truly, and she has gained
| such experience as comes only through the rending of the
| heart-strings; but nothing that she has passed through has seared nor
| soured her, and if it has taken off just the lighter edge of her
| girlishness it has left the core as bright and cheery as ever.
| In person she is generally of the style called <p> 'elegant' </p> and
| wonderfully young in mere physical appearance. Perhaps sharp eyes
| might spy out here and there a little silver thread among the soft
| brown hair; and when fatigued or set in a cross light, lines not quite
| belonging to the teens may be traced about her eyes and mouth; but in
| favourable conditions, with her graceful figure advantageously draped
| and her fair face flushed and animated, she looks just a great girl,
| no more; and she feels as she looks. It is well for her if her husband
| is a wise man, and more proud of her than he is jealous; for he must
| submit to see her admired by all the men who know her, according to
| their individual manner of expressing admiration. But as purity of
| nature and singleness of heart belong to her qualification for great
| girlishness, he has no cause for alarm, and she is as safe with Don
| Juan as with St. Anthony.
| These great girls, as middle-aged matrons, are often seen in the
| country; and one of the things which most strikes a Londoner is the
| abiding youthfulness of this kind of matron. She has a large family,
| the elders of which are grown up, but she has lost none of the beauty
| for which her youth was noted, though it is now a different kind of
| beauty from what it was then; and she has still the air and manners of
| a girl. She blushes easily, is shy, and sometimes apt to be a little
| awkward, though always sweet and gentle; she knows very little of real
| life and less of its vices; she is pitiful to sorrow, affectionate to
| her friends who are few in number, and strongly attached to her own
| family; she has no theological doubts, no scientific proclivities, and
| the conditions of society and the family do not perplex her. She
| thinks Darwinism and protoplasm dangerous innovations; and the
| doctrine of Free Love with Mrs. Cady Staunton's development is
| something too shocking for her to talk about. She lifts her calm clear
| eyes in wonder at the wild proceedings of the shrieking sisterhood,
| and cannot for the life of her make out what all this tumult means,
| and what the women want. For herself, she has no doubts whatever, no
| moral uncertainties. The path of duty is as plain to her as are the
| words of the Bible, and she loves her husband too well to wish to be
| his rival or to desire an individualized existence outside his. She is
| his wife, she says; and that seems more satisfactory to her than to be
| herself a Somebody in the full light of notoriety, with him in the
| shade as her appendage.
| If inclined to be intolerant to <reg orig=”any one”> anyone </reg>, 
| it is to those who seek to
| disturb the existing state of things, or whose speculations unsettle
| men's minds; those who, as she thinks, entangle the sense of that
| which is clear and straightforward enough if they would but leave it
| alone, and who, by their love of iconoclasm, run the risk of
| destroying more than idols. But she is intolerant only because she
| believes that when men put forth false doctrines they put them forth
| for a bad purpose, and to do intentional mischief. Had she not this
| simple faith, which no philosophic questionings have either enlarged
| or disturbed, she would not be the great girl she is; and what she
| would have gained in catholicity she would have lost in freshness. For
| herself, she has no self-asserting power, and would shrink from any
| kind of public action; but she likes to visit the poor, and is
| sedulous in the matter of tracts and flannel-petticoats, vexing the
| souls of the sterner, if wiser, guardians and magistrates by her
| generosity which they affirm only encourages idleness and creates
| pauperism. She cannot see it in that light. Charity is one of the
| cardinal virtues of Christianity; accordingly, charitable she will
| be, in spite of all that political economists may say.
| She belongs to her family, they do not belong to her; and you seldom
| hear her say <p> 'I went' </p> or <p> 'I did.' </p> 
| It is always <p> 'we;' </p> which, though a
| small point, is a significant one, showing how little she holds to
| anything like an isolated individuality, and how entirely she feels a
| woman's life to belong to and be bound up in her home relations. She
| is romantic too, and has her dreams and memories of early days; when
| her eyes grow moist as she looks at her husband ~~ the first and only
| man she ever loved ~~ and the past seems to be 
| only part of the present.
| The experience which she must needs have had has served only to make
| her more gentle, more pitiful, than the ordinary girl, who is
| naturally inclined to be a little hard; and of all her household she
| is the kindest and the most intrinsically sympathetic. She keeps up
| her youth for the children's sake she says; and they love her more
| like an elder sister than the traditional mother. They never think of
| her as old, for she is their constant companion and can do all that
| they do. She is fond of exercise; is a good walker; an active climber;
| a bold horsewoman; a great promoter of picnics and open-air
| amusements. She looks almost as young as her eldest daughter
| differentiated by a cap and covered shoulders; and her sons have a
| certain playfulness in their love for her which makes them more her
| brothers than her sons. Some of them are elderly men before she has
| ceased to be a great girl; for she keeps her youth to the last by
| virtue of a clear conscience, a pure mind and a loving nature. She is
| wise in her generation and takes care of her health by means of active
| habits, fresh air, cold water and a sparing use of medicines and
| stimulants; and if the dear soul is proud of anything it is of her
| figure, which she keeps trim and elastic to the last, and of the
| clearness of her complexion, which no heated rooms have soddened, no
| accustomed strong waters have clouded nor bloated.
| Then there are great girls of another kind ~~ women who, losing the
| sweetness of youth, do not get in its stead the dignity of maturity;
| who are fretful, impatient, undisciplined, knowing no more of
| themselves nor human nature than they did when they were nineteen, yet
| retaining nothing of that innocent simplicity, that single-hearted
| freshness and joyousness of nature which one does not wish to see
| disturbed even for the sake of a deeper knowledge. These are the women
| who will not get old and who consequently do not keep young; who, when
| they are fifty, dress themselves in gauze and rosebuds, and think to
| conceal their years by a judicious use of many paint-pots and the
| liberality of the hairdresser; who are jealous of their daughters,
| whom they keep back as much and as long as they can, and terribly
| aggrieved at their irrepressible six feet of sonship; women who have a
| trick of putting up their fans before their faces as if they were
| blushing; who give you the impression of flounces and ringlets, and
| who flirt by means of much laughter and a long-sustained giggle; who
| talk incessantly, yet have said nothing to the purpose when they have
| done; and who simper and confess they are not strong-minded but only
| <p> 'awfully silly little things,' </p> 
| when you try to lead the conversation
| into anything graver than fashion and flirting. They are women who
| never learn repose of mind nor dignity of manner; who never lose their
| taste for mindless amusements, and never acquire one for nature nor
| for quiet happiness; and who like to have lovers always hanging about
| them ~~ men for the most part younger than themselves, whom they call
| naughty boys and tap playfully by way of rebuke. They are women unable
| to give young girls good advice on prudence or conduct; mothers who
| know nothing of children; mistresses ignorant of the alphabet of
| housekeeping; wives whose husbands are merely the bankers, and most
| probably the bugbears, of the establishment; women who think it
| horrible to get old and to whom, when you talk of spiritual peace or
| intellectual pleasures, you are as unintelligible as if you were
| discoursing in the Hebrew tongue. As a class they are wonderfully
| inept; and their hands are practically useless, save as ring-stands
| and glove-stretchers. For they can do nothing with them, not even
| frivolous fancy-work. They read only novels; and one of the marvels of
| their existence is what they do with themselves in those hours when
| they are not dressing, flirting, nor paying visits.
| If they are of a querulous and nervous type, their children fly from
| them to the furthest corners of the house; if they are molluscous and
| good-natured, they let themselves be manipulated up to a certain
| point, but always on the understanding that they are only a few years
| older than their daughters; almost all these women, by some fatality
| peculiar to themselves, having married when they were about ten years
| old, and having given birth to progeny with the uncomfortable property
| of looking at the least half a dozen years older than they are. This
| accounts for the phenomenon of a girlish matron of this kind, dressed
| to represent first youth, with a sturdy black-browed débutante by her
| side, looking, you would swear to it, of full majority if a day. Her
| only chance is to get that black-browed tell-tale married out of hand;
| and this is the reason why so many daughters of great girls of this
| type make such notoriously early ~~ and bad ~~ matches; 
| and why, when once
| married, they are never seen in society again.
| Grandmaternity and girlishness scarcely fit in well together, and
| rosebuds are a little out of place when a nursery of the second degree
| is established. There are scores of women fluttering through society
| at this moment whose elder daughters have been socially burked by the
| friendly agency of a marriage almost as soon as, or even before, they
| were introduced, and who are therefore, no longer witnesses against
| the hairdresser and the paint-pots; and there are scores of these
| same marriageable daughters eating out their hearts and spoiling their
| pretty faces in the school-room a couple of years beyond their time,
| that mamma may still believe the world takes her to be under thirty
| yet ~~ and young at that.