Word: maidening
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...Like David Copperfield's Aunt Betsey Trotwood, all literary aunts should be brisk and, if possible, maiden. But to be really successful they must also have a dull, dim nephew as a foil. Also, it is the aunts' tragedy that their stories are invariably written by their dim nephews...
...from Maiden. Greene's dimly tragic nephew is Henry Pulling, an unmarried London bank manager who has retired to look after his dahlias. His comic aunt is Miss Augusta Bertram, who at 75 concedes that her life expectancy may be only 25 years. She is far from maiden. Nephew first meets her at the cremation of his mother. The ashes are intended for a tasteful urn among his dahlias, but somehow, in the overpowering presence of Augusta, Henry leaves the urn behind in his aunt's apartment. He is only reminded of his dead mother by a chance...
...supertanker Marpessa sailed serenely past West Africa on the second leg of her maiden voyage, an explosion suddenly ripped her hull. Last week the shattered hulk slipped to the bottom about 50 miles off Dakar. Marpessa was the biggest oil tanker to sink to date. Fortunately, she was empty-a narrow escape from what has become a serious threat to the surprisingly vulnerable ocean...
...feet. Rather fussily elegant in his dress-flowered velvet suit, lots of ruffles, snuffbox to flutter over-Gibbon exuded a tepid blandness. Joshua Reynolds painted a deadly portrait of him. His profile is distinctly not that of a Roman emperor. He has the eyes of a maiden aunt, a tiny Cupid's mouth, and a second chin far more impressive than the first. Even his hands manage to look pudgily repressed...
...than the Journal Aphra, published this fall for the first time, is a small literary magazine that proposes to "give outlet to the feminine consciousness." Its preamble says: "The emphasis will be on art, not on ideology." The consequence is: a collection of bon voyages for the magazine's maiden trip from literary "friends" (Anne Sexton and Simone de Beauvior included) ; two entirely didactic (unproduceable) plays; two laborious poems; two light-as-whippedcream poems: two remarkable short stories; and a list of "Aphraisms" -quotations relating to women, such as "I'm tired of ?iptocing around the male ego." (Anne Sexton...