Word: girlhood
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Less picturesque than such better known family memoirs as Life With Father, Grandma Called It Carnal, Mencken's Happy Days, Author Flexner's story of her girlhood is nevertheless charming Americana. Quaker-plain in the telling, it is noteworthy among oldsters' memoirs for one fact in particular: despite Author Flexner's pleasant memories, she evokes the unmistakable stresses and veiled repressions that lay under the surface...
...dreamy moments when the Maid listens to her Voices, in the pathetic moments when she becomes terrified of the stake, in the radiant moments when she returns from beyond the grave to find she has become a legend and a saint, Luise Rainer was all innocent girlhood. But she could not spring to life as the other Joan -the fierce and fiery spirit, the obdurate deliverer of her people. Her voice rose, her eyes flashed, her little fists clenched to no avail: the effect was stagy and elocutionary...
Biographer Ballou introduces her subject with an overwritten essay, then settles down to a straightforward, less flighty account of Ella's dreamy girlhood in an irritable and defeated Wisconsin farm family, her indefatigable poem writing (sometimes eight a day), her conquering arrival in Milwaukee, her instinctive refusal of such rare, insufficiently flattering criticism as Julia Ward Howe's ("she thought [Ella's ability] might be developed into real talent with study and hard work"), her fatal love of making a sensation, gratified by the tempest of propriety that erected Poems of Passion, her brief affair with James...
...With the One Coin for Fee two aging women, girlhood friends, meet after many years as 1938's New England hurricane blows up. One is at the end of a sexually avid and shameless career; the other is a spinster who jealously despises her. They die in the hurricane, reconciled...
Scots ideas of discipline in child training molded the future Queen from birth. In her girlhood as Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, not only was she taught to cook, sew and garden but on certain days, dressed as a housemaid, it was her duty to show tourists the sights of Glamis and afterward when most of them offered tips she was Scotch about that too. About 30 miles from Glamis is the Royal Family's Balmoral Castle, and Queen Mary took an early fancy to budding Lady Elizabeth who presently in 1922 was bridesmaid to Princess Mary. King George...