#victoria

Jean's whole job is to protect Victoria. Jean is a very practical, very orderly, very disciplined person; she is the personality called the gatekeeper. ↗

— Erika Slezak

#disciplined #jean #job #orderly #person

The first Victoria's Secret model I ever met was Adriana Lima, and she was so nice to me. She was very generous and very nurturing. She made sure people talked to me! ↗

— Lily Aldridge

#first #generous #i #made #me

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#literary-criticism #literary-theory #narrative #nineteenth-century #novels

In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#parenthood #victorian-era #home

Is it an endearing quirk among European explorers to imagine that every geographical feature they clap eyes on for the first time is in need of a new name, or is if just a plain silly one? As far as I understand, humans have been knocking around this part of Africa for - give or take a birthday candle- three million years. The existence of a large wet patch smack in the middle of them had not gone unnoticed. How large? Bigger than Lake Michigan, bigger than Tasmania, bigger than Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Rhode Island all rolled into one. It is so big that people on one side gave it one name, people on the other side gave it another, and people in between gave it several more. But that didn't matter to Dr Livingstone. Along he came and he didn't ask the locals what they called this large lake at the top end of the Nile. He gave it yet another name, in honour of the elder of a tribe of white people on a small island five thousand miles away. ↗

— Nicholas Drayson

#imagination

I see. I imagined that he was cast out of all decent society". "If society were really decent, he would have been ↗

— George R. Gissing

#victorian-era #women-s-issues #imagination

---In his major phase, he[Conrad] was "ahead of his times" in ideas and techniques;and this was because he was more intelligently and perceptively of his times than most writers then were. In his vigilant response to 19th century preoccupations, he anticipated--often critically--many 20th century preoccupations. He was a versatile intermediary between the Romantic and Victorian traditions and the innovations of Modernism. ↗

— Cedric Watts A Preface to Conrad p

#literary-status #modernism #victorian #intelligence

But our lives were not as they seemed, were they, Sophia? No one's life ever is. ↗

— Jean Plaidy

#life #queen-victoria #life

In 1895 Lady Londonberry commented acidly on a bridegroom who had 'married the 10,000 a year as well as the lady. ↗

— Pamela Horn

#marriages-of-convenience #victoriana #victorians #life

Up the still, glistening beaches, Up the creeks we will hie, Over banks of bright seaweed The ebb-tide leaves dry. We will gaze, from the sand-hills, At the white, sleeping town; At the church on the hill-side— And then come back down. Singing: "There dwells a loved one, But cruel is she! She left lonely for ever The kings of the sea. (from poem 'The Forsaken Merman') ↗

— Matthew Arnold

#mermaids #poem #poetry #victorian-era #love