victorian-era

Self-preservation and determination meant she could get away with anything. As her law-abiding, conventionally minded daughter, I secretly envied her this. She was not the clinging-vine type, nor one who could coax sugar from a lemon. Hers was the frontal attack with no inhibitions. She told the Nazis you could not trust Hitler, and they let her go. In the days of chaperones, she hitch-hiked a ride on a French destroyer along the coast of Crete; 'All quite proper, I had my cook with me,' she explained.

There's a bit of a local legend about a jet heart that has turned up over the years," Flynn said. "Any time it turns up, strange things happen.

The boy with the haunted eyes was Dory's secret. Eli. And she knew that she had to see him again.

With a heart of furious fanciesWhereof I am commander:With a burning spear,And a horse of air,To the wilderness I wander...

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.

One character all messages had in common was vague generality. "Fly away with me," a tussie-mussie might suggest, but never "Meet me at the railway depot at six-thirty.

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, on the 15th October, 1856, so that he is now about twenty-six years of age, but brief as has been his career, it has been full of promise for the future. The son of highly intellectual parents, he has had an exceptional education, has travelled much in wild and remote, through classic lands, and in the course of these journeys has learnt to appreciate the beauties of the old authors, in whose works whilst at college he attained exceptional proficiency. But his naturally enthusiastic temperament teaches him to hope for better in the future than has been achieved in the past, and to see how vast will be the influence of Art and Literature on the coming democracy of Intellect, when education and culture shall have taught men to pride themselves on what they have done, and not alone on the deeds of their ancestors.

Victorian rigidities were such that ladies were not even allowed to blow out candles in mixed company, as that required them to pucker their lips suggestively. They could not say that they were going "to bed"--that planted too stimulating an image--but merely that they were "retiring." It became effectively impossible to discuss clothing in even a clinical sense without resort to euphemisms. Trousers became "nether integuments" or simply "inexpressibles" and underwear was "linen." Women could refer among themselves to petticoats or, in hushed tones, stockings, but could mention almost nothing else that brushed bare flesh.

She wore tight corsets to give her a teeny waist - I helped her lace them up - but they had the effect of causing her to faint. Mom called it the vapors and said it was a sign of her high breeding and delicate nature. I thought it was a sign that the corset made it hard to breathe.

Thinking back on the outing to the theatre, she added, __ want a man, not a preening peacock!

You have a spine of steel and fire in your eyes, Rosalie. To have such a quality, one must be shaken to the foundation of one__ soul and put back together. I want to know how you emerged from hell made of steel and fire.

You make me burn with life, and yearn to set aside my cold and distant, solitary ways.

What do ladies wear beneath their riding trousers?""I would think an infamous rake would already know.""I was never infamous. In fact, I'm fairly standard as far as rakes go.""The ones who deny it are the worst.

It's a sin.""How do you know?""Because it feels like one," she managed to say.He laughed quietly and pulled her hips farther toward him with a decisiveness that drew a little yelp from her. "In that case...I never sin by half measures.

You took Theo's title and his home," West continued in appalled disbelief, "and now you want his wife.""His widow," Devon muttered."Have you seduced her?""Not yet."West clapped his hand to his forehead. "Christ. Don't you think she's suffered enough?

The woman was not what would be termed an exquisite, or what his grandfather__ generation would have styled __ diamond of the first water._ There was something too primal in her features and her bearing, and her aura shimmered with power. She was a sunset on a mountain peak, or the eerie colors in the sky in the far north of Scotland. She was a vein of gold still glittering inside the rock, her treasure clear but held close, in her own keeping.She would never belong to anyone but herself, and that made him long for her to share that self with him__n every conceivable way.

An unhappy woman with access to weed killer had to be watched carefully.

I AM the current curator of the black trunk and the stories it holds within.