Word: gentlewomen
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PURCELL: DIDO & AENEAS (Angel). If the English had not loved spoken drama so well, Henry Purcell might have started a glorious operatic tradition in his country. As it was, Dido and Aeneas is Purcell's only opera, which he composed for a 1689 performance by the "Young Gentlewomen" at Josias Priest's School in Chelsea. This album boasts a more distinguished roster of singers, including Victoria de los Angeles, but Purcell's baroque is as airy and clear as a birdsong in an English meadow-and sounds just as repetitious. Sir John Barbirolli conducts with vivacity...
Powers of Bitchery. As Elizabeth Bowen's new novel (her first since 1955) opens, the little girls have become sad-eyed, sixtyish English gentlewomen. Dicey is now Dinah Delacroix, a handsome if slightly dotty widow who lives on her Somerset estate in equivocal intimacy with a cross-eyed, 19-year-old Maltese manservant. Remembering the buried treasure chest, she rounds up her long-lost friends and informs them that it is time to dig up the box and rediscover their old happiness...
...another side of the social life, a Cambridge gentlewomen advertised that "Harvard '09 men agreed it was 'remarkable' to learn the WALTZ in three (private) lessons." For formal wear, it was the "Mac Hurdle" full dress shirt: Absolutely no bulge," Mac Hurdle claimed; the patented band and bosom does...
...father of four daughters (one out last year, one coming out in the last batch of debs for this year, and two now doomed to stay "in" forever), admitted: "Candidly, it will be a financial boon." The only truly crestfallen mourners were the battalion of aristocratic British gentlewomen in reduced circumstances who for years have eked out their meager pensions by sponsoring (for fees running as high as ?1,000) the daughters of better-heeled but less nobly born parents. Said Mrs. Rennie O'Mahony, headmistress of Cygnet House, which accepts a fee to train prospective debutantes...
...Ladies. The Mirror itself was as niminy piminy as it could be when it was founded in 1903 by the late great Press Lord Northcliffe as "a newspaper for gentlewomen, produced by ladies of breeding." After less than a year, with its circulation barely at 25,000, Northcliffe decided the paper was a "mad frolic" because "women can't write, and don't want to read." He ordered his editor to fire the staff and start over again, remaking the Mirror as Britain's first popular picture daily. Getting rid of the women, said one of Northcliffe...