Word: gentlefolk
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Love That Scrubwoman! Conan Doyle was born (1859) in Edinburgh, the son of a frustrated painter who scraped a poor living in the civil service. Almost from the time he could toddle, the brawny boy was steeped in the favorite subject of Britain's poorer gentlefolk-the ancient and glorious past of the withered family tree. Impoverished Father Doyle claimed a relationship with the ducal house of Brittany. Little Arthur spent many of his juvenile hours memorizing the family coats-of-arms, while his plucky mama briskly scrubbed the floor and called out knightly maxims: "Fearless to the strong...
...paranoiac gentlefolk...
...human abnormalities (including two deaf mutes, one case of dementia praecox, one spinster drowned in a rain barrel). Delta Wedding adds only one: an amiable child who is not all there. But she is very much all there as one of the eccentric, enormous Fairchilds family-nonchalant Mississippi gentlefolk who flit in & out of the doors and windows of their ancestral mansion much as the yellow butterflies flitted in & out of the train, and whom Author Welty manages to pin down during the few days when they are in a bustle over the marriage of one of the girls...
First came the White Russians, who as taxi drivers, doormen or waiters could not forget that they had once been gentlefolk. Next came the people who had laughed loudest at the White Russians, the fugitives from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Then in a swamping human surf came the fugitives from Spain. Czechoslovakia, the Low Countries, France. All of them bore, like a leper's bell, the one ineffaceable possession left them by their ordeal-the mood of quiet desperation, quiet, because its very existence threatened the peace of mind of those who still felt secure; quiet, because...
Contemporary Charleston is full of high-willed traditions, high-walled houses and high-born gentlefolk like Judith Redcliff, who would not think of having Sunday dinner before three in the afternoon. Shut in by such walls, lusty commoners like Lorena Hessenwinkle seem more vital, vulgar and exciting than they would otherwise. Judith's husband - the triangle's apex - happens to be dead but is still alive enough to cause high-tension bickering between the girls at Judith's three o'clock dinner. Novelist Josephine Pinckney has water-colored a neat, pale comedy of manners which...