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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men, chapter 4 (search)
IV. the woman of influence. Mr.Worth, the eminent Paris dress-maker, telegraphs to the Boston Sunday Herald that the great and pressing need of the age is a Woman of Influence, somewhere or other, to set the fashions. In default of this, he has, after exhausting his genius upon a new dress, to use various indirect devices to bring it into vogue. If one thinks what a beautiful work of art a lady's dress may be, when wealth and Worth have done their best for it, and what an appalling product mere wealth without taste can develop under that name, one may well give a sigh of sympathy to this man of genius who can find no woman quite worthy of his scissors. Yet the truth is that the Woman of Influence is demanded not alone to wear clothes, but to modify and control all the habits of society. A person of power, of individuality, of resources, of charm, is needed in every place where a woman stands, and is not to be had in answer to an advertisement. What we want, said a certain
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men, chapter 31 (search)
XXXI. men's novels and women's novels. It is a curious fact that Paris, to which the works of Jane Austen were lately as unknown as if she were an English painter, has just discovered her existence. Moreover, it has announced that she, and she only, is the founder of that realistic school which is construed to include authors so remote from each other as the French Zola and the American Howells. The most decorous of maiden ladies is thus made to originate the extreme of indecorum; and the good loyal English-woman, devoted to Church and King, is made sponsor for the most democratic recognition of persons whom she would have loathed as vulgar. There is something extremely grotesque in the situation; and yet there is much truth in the theory. It certainly looked at one tine as if Miss Austen had thoroughly established the claim of her sex to the minute delineation of character and manners, leaving to men the bolder school of narrative romance. She herself spoke of her exquisi