"Prudery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we Greeks of the age of Pericles we might at our ease eulogise those beautiful serpentine lines, those polished flanks, those elegant curves, those breasts which might have served as moulds for the cup of Hebe; but modern prudery forbids such descriptions, for the pen cannot find pardon for what is permitted to the chisel; and besides, there are some things which can be written of ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... me when you took them peacefully and promptly, without prudery—that sentiment which I ever dread to excite, and which, when it is revealed in eye or gesture, I vindictively detest. To return. Not only did I watch you; but often—especially at eventide— another guardian angel ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the great debauchees and small atheistical wits more than any new play that ever came out. He was not a man of fashion who wanted one of them in his pocket, or could draw it out at the coffee-house.'[278] In certain drawing-rooms, too, where prudery was not the fault, there were many fashionable ladies who would pass from the scandal and gossip of the day to applaud Tillotson's sermon in a sense which would have made him shudder.[279] Nothing follows from this, unless it be assumed that the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... herself. He by no means met with the reception which he had expected from the pretty girl in a faded cotton gown; Henrietta treated him with a certain amount of good humored respect, which had a much more unpleasant effect on him than that coldness and prudery, which is so often synonymous with coquetry and selfish speculation, among a certain class of women. In spite of everything, however, he soon went to see her daily, and lavished his wealth, without her asking him for anything, on the beautiful dancer, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... thick-headed man this is!" she said, pleasantly. "Must I put it more plainly still? Engage in what your English prudery calls a 'flirtation,' with some woman here—the lower in degree the better, or the Princess might be jealous—and let the affair be seen and known by everybody about the Court. Sly as he is, the Doctor ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... these excuses, pride, or prudery, or delicacy, or love of ease, keep one half of the world out of the way of observing ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... humanity, when it does not exclude other things more to be welcomed still, is very decidedly not to be preferred to the other things themselves. Corinne has these—or most of them. She is beautiful; she is amiable; she is unselfish; without the slightest touch of prudery she has the true as well as the technical chastity; and she is really the victim of inauspicious stars, and of the misconduct of other people—the questionable wisdom of her own father; the folly of Nelvil's; the wilfulness in the bad sense, and the weakness of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... her manners, shaking R——, P——, and me, by the hand, "tak, tak;" and gathering her petticoats tight about her legs, yet without any semblance of prudery, walked to the gangway, and, without aid, jumped into the boat. Seating herself on the scarlet cushions, the cockswain receiving permission from her to go on, with all the gravity due to a queen gave the word to his men, and away the gig shot, the girl kissing her hand all the time affectionately, ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... restrain themselves; the conversation was free and they swore liberally. When all was said and done, it was prudery that was Norway's curse and Norway's bane; people preferred to let their young girls go to the dogs in ignorance rather than enlighten them while there was time. Prudery was the nourishing vice of the moment. So help me, there ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... retain for use solely when she saw there was advantage. The East uses dress for ornament, and understands its use. The veil is for places where men might look with too bold eyes and covet. Out of sight of privileged men prudery has no place, and almost no advocates all the way from Peshawar to ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... he has the family voice and manner very strongly, and at any rate does not murder the text of Shakespeare. I have no more time to spare now, for I must get my tea and go to the theater. I must tell you, though, of an instance of provincial prudery (delicacy, I suppose I ought to call it) which edified us not a little at rehearsal this morning: the Mercutio, on seeing the nurse and Peter, called out, "A sail, a sail!" and terminated the speech in a significant whisper, which, being ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... all—it cannot be left entirely to the Government, to Parliament, or to the medical profession. If a healthier atmosphere were created for the proper consideration of this subject, instead of the unwholesome fog of prudery in which it has been enveloped in the past, a great deal will have ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... the character of moral and rational beings, so that no flattering but injurious unction may be applied to film over the real turpitude of their offences—then, and then only, may it be safely asserted, that such descriptions as we have been considering, are the offspring of prudery or inflamed imagination, and have no prototype ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... humour, began to relate his adventures with madame de Grammont; but here you must pardon me, my friend, for so entirely did his majesty give the reins to his inclination for a plain style of language, that, although excess of prudery formed no part of the character of any of the ladies assembled, we were compelled to sit with our eyes fixed upon our plate or glass, not daring to meet the glance of those near us. I have little doubt but that ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... she knows of no other sin than the sin against her law; she is on the side of the strong for her desire is for strong children, even though she should have to kill the "eternal ego" of the insignificant individual. And there is no prudery, no hesitation, no fear of consequences, for nature has plenty of food for all ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... the flowery meads of May; under the forest boughs, where birds sang to their mates; by the side of the winter hearth; from the lips of wandering minstrels; in the hearts of young creatures, whom neither the profligacy of worldlings, nor the prudery of monks, had yet defiled: from them arose a voice, most human and yet most divine, reasserting once more the lost law of Eden, and finding in its fulfilment, strength and purity, self-sacrifice ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... awkwardness for an expression of reserve that should be as good as irony for irony, though where Madame de Rouaillout's irony lay, or whether it was irony at all, our excellent English dame could not have stated, after the feeling of indignant prudery responding to it so guiltily ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is his spirit of extreme individualism (which distinguishes him from the German) combined with the religious nature of his moral fervour (which distinguishes him from the Frenchman), both being veiled by a shy prudery (which distinguishes him alike from the Frenchman and the German). The Englishman's reverence for the individual's rights goes beyond the Frenchman's, for in France there is a tendency to subordinate the individual to the family, and in England the interests of the individual ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... been crushed by a policy of thundering outcry, which is heard in every home and every nursery. This loudness of debate is surely an effect of the horror with which the appalling misery around us is suddenly discovered. All which was hidden by prudery is disclosed in its viciousness, and this outburst of indignation is the result. Yet it would never have swollen to this overwhelming flood if the nation were not convinced that this is the only way to cause a betterment ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... borrowed at first hand, understanding what he was borrowing. W.D. Howells borrowed at second hand, and without understanding what he was borrowing. Altogether Mr James's instincts are more scholarly. Although his reserve irritates me, and I often regret his concessions to the prudery of the age,—no, not of the age but of librarians,—I cannot but feel that his concessions, for I suppose I must call them concessions, are to a certain extent self-imposed, regretfully, perhaps...somewhat in this fashion—"True, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... both engaged and that makes it very easy. Harold will do what you ask him, especially as you have told him the reason why, and my Charles will do it without even wanting to know the reason. Now you know what Mrs. Westmacott thinks about the reserve of young ladies. Mere prudery, affectation, and a relic of the dark ages of the Zenana. Those were her words, were ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... generation of biographers dead today. Half the lives of the great and good men, which are published in England and America, are expanded tracts. Let the biographer be tactful, but do not let him be cowardly; let him cultivate delicacy, but avoid its ridiculous parody, prudery. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... Miss Howe.—Is terrified by him. Disclaims prudery. Begs of Miss Howe to perfect her scheme, that she may leave him. She thinks her temper changed for the worse. Trembles to look back upon his encroachments. Is afraid, on the close self-examination which her calamities have caused her to make, that even in the best actions of her past life ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... inestimable; they will be more feelingly remembered when England has once more to face the danger of political tyranny. I am thinking now of its effects upon social life. To it we owe the characteristic which, in some other countries, is expressed by the term English prudery, the accusation implied being part of the general charge of hypocrisy. It is said by observers among ourselves that the prudish habit of mind is dying out, and this is looked upon as a satisfactory thing, as a sign of healthy emancipation. If by prude be meant a secretly vicious person ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... the Middle Ages, invariably had the upper hand; his Venus has, despite her forms studied from the antique and her gesture imitated from some earlier discovered copy of the Medicean Venus, the woe-begone prudery of a Madonna or of an abbess; she shivers physically and morally in her unaccustomed nakedness, and the goddess of Spring, who comes skipping up from beneath the laurel copse, does well to prepare her a mantle, for in the paled tempera colour, against the dismal ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... ill-looking Taveta girls, who had lost their hearts to their white or their Swahili guests, shed bitter tears, and told their woe preferably to our two ladies, who fortunately did not understand a word of these effusive demonstrations of the Tavetan female heart. Prudery is an unknown thing in Equatorial Africa; and the Taveta fair ones would have been as little able to understand why anyone should think it wrong to open one's heart to a guest as their white sisters ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... abruptly, and he set her down, his ears tingling. For Sissy, outraged in her sense of dignity as well as in the offish prudery that characterized her, declined to accept patronage as anybody's little sister, and boxed his ears as well as she could in the ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... school have the great mystery of Nature sullied for them in their tender years by coarseness and depravity. Whereas, in ancient Greek times, the mystery was holy, and with a pious mind men worshipped the Force of Nature without exaggerated prudery and without shamelessness, such conditions are impossible in a society where for a thousand years Nature herself has been depreciated by Religion, associated with sin and the Devil, stamped as unmentionable and in preference denied, in which, for that very reason, brutality takes so much ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... says about the pruriently titillating convexities, whether frontward or hindward, suggests a little prudery. For in his rhymes he betrays both his comrade and himself. Battery Park and the attractions thereof prove fatal. Elsewhere, therefore, they must go, and begin to draw on their bank accounts. Which does not mean, however, that they are far from the snare. No; for when a ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... with dusky mantle covers The skies (and the more duskily the better), The Time less liked by husbands than by lovers Begins, and Prudery flings aside her fetter; And Gaiety on restless tiptoe hovers, Giggling with all the gallants who beset her; And there are songs and quavers, roaring, humming, Guitars, and every other ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... the Crystal Palace) when I was near London; and (most complete of all) she offered to call on us in Edinburgh! Wasn't it delicious?—she is a girl of sixteen or seventeen, too, and the latter I think. I never yet saw a girl so innocent and fresh, so perfectly modest without the least trace of prudery. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... itself, that much tabooed subject of sexuality. Unfortunately, as Hitschmann[6] says, physicians in their personal relations to the sexual life have not been given any preference over the rest of the children of men and many of them stand under the ban of that combination of prudery and lust which governs the attitude of most cultivated people in sexual matters. Especially unsavory appears to most people Freud's theory of infantile sexuality, a subject which has heretofore been looked upon chiefly from a moralistic standpoint, and was ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... in her prudery, nor did the youth, in fact, seem altogether free from a similar sort of shyness; so they sat apart from each other, gazing up the hill, where the moonlight discovered the tops of a group of buildings. While their attention ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... may be said really to possess. The old maid has failed in her natural function and thus exhibits all that is implied in this accident; bitterness, envy, unpleasantness, hard judgment of others' qualities and deeds, difficulty in forming new relationships, exaggerated fear and prudery, the latter mainly as simulation of innocence. It is a well-known fact that every experienced judge may confirm that old maids (we mean here, always, childless, unmarried women of considerable age— not maids in the anatomical sense) as witnesses, always bring something ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of it; but he did not quite like this, and perhaps his face revealed as much, for the Baroness hastened with great agility to quit the theme. She began to offer to Paul some little insight into her own history. It would be a prudery, she said, to pretend to be sensitive about it any longer—the whole world knew the sordid and melancholy truth; and this sounded like a prelude to a much fuller explanation than she was for the moment ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... this prudery," thought Eustace. "True, my love; poor Fido.—It is kind in you to remember that faithful animal. He died on his travels, and I assure you I dropped a ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... Just when the first sheets of this edition were passing through the press, a violent attack was made in a newspaper correspondence on the morality of Tom Jones by certain notorious advocates of Purity, as some say, of Pruriency and Prudery combined, according to less complimentary estimates. Even midway between the two periods we find the admirable Miss Ferrier, a sister of Fielding's own craft, who sometimes had touches of nature and satire not far inferior to his own, expressing by the mouth of one of her characters ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... fortune by what Fate and my own fault has deprived me of—the affection of a woman or a child." Here there came a sigh from somewhere near Warrington in the dark, and a hand was held out in his direction, which, however, was instantly, withdrawn, for the prudery of our females is such, that before all expression of feeling, or natural kindness and regard, a woman is 'taught to think of herself and the proprieties, and to be ready to blush at the very slightest notice;' and ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... your Lisson Grove prudery here, young woman. You've got to learn to behave like a duchess. Take her away, Mrs. Pearce. If she gives ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... pronounced his act a piece of political prudery. One journalistic wag observed, 'A lady's footman jumped off the Great Western train, going forty miles an hour, merely to pick up his hat. Pretty much like this act, so disproportional to the occasion, is ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... have the strongest praise for the book as a whole—the biological foundation, directness, freedom from cant and prudery and the practical way in which the author gets to the level of his readers."—Dr. C. Judson ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... vice is opposed to a virtue. Now certain vices are opposed to shamefacedness, namely shamelessness and inordinate prudery. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... charge in which prudery and affectation were implied, was compelled to submit to it, as either to send for Delvile, or explain her objections, was equally impossible. The Miss Charltons, therefore, joined them, and ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... incompatible with knowledge, it is its fairest fruit. What a gross idea of modesty had the writer of the following remark! "The lady who asked the question whether women may be instructed in the modern system of botany, consistently with female delicacy?" was accused of ridiculous prudery: nevertheless, if she had proposed the question to me, I should certainly have answered—They cannot." Thus is the fair book of knowledge to be shut with an everlasting seal! On reading similar passages I have reverentially ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... duty of every true man and woman at this hour of their country's day to begin to THINK, to weigh for himself or herself the meanings of the signs of the times, to use their critical faculties, to face facts honestly, unhampered by prudery, convention, or the doctrines of the Church. And then they will see for themselves that the Great Unrest is a force, the direction of which, for good or ill, lies in their own hands. And according to the way they ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... slave to prudery and smug convention you are," she observed with amused contempt. "Nobody in the University is going to shock ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... Count's hotel. La Fleur's PREVENANCY (for there was a passport in his very looks) soon set every servant in the kitchen at ease with him; and as a Frenchman, whatever be his talents, has no sort of prudery in showing them, La Fleur, in less than five minutes, had pulled out his fife, and leading off the dance himself with the first note, set the fille de chambre, the maitre d'hotel, the cook, the scullion, and all the house-hold, ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... it is now plain, in order to have a pretence against me, taxed my behaviour to him with stiffness and distance. You, at one time, thought me guilty of some degree of prudery. Difficult situations should be allowed for: which often make seeming occasions for censure unavoidable. I deserved not blame from him who made mine difficult. And you, my dear, had I any other man to deal with, or had he but half the merit which Mr. Hickman ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... wrath, and ridiculed her antiquated prudery; but knowing that the pure and noble mothers, wives, and daughters, honored and trusted her, Edna gave no heed to raillery and envious malice, but resolutely obeyed the promptings of ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Angelique, raising her face to his, suffused with a blush; "if I do not give you the love you ask for it is because you have it already; but ask no more at present from me—this, at least, is yours," said she, kissing him twice, without prudery or hesitation. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... temperance movement of the 30's and 40's, which penetrated to the very floor of Congress and put "dry" laws upon the statute-books of ten States; and on the third hand, as it were, it established a prudery in speech and thought from which we are yet but half delivered. Such ancient and innocent words as "bitch" and "bastard" disappeared from the American language; Bartlett tells us, indeed, in his "Dictionary ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... secret had begun to spread; all the children would relate the events of yesterday in their own homes; to pass the thing over was impossible. She sincerely regretted the step she must take, and to which she would not have felt herself driven by any ill-placed prudery of her own. On Monday morning it must be stated to the girls ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... however, was a success. The youngish men there found him interesting, and liked to shock him with tales of naughty London and naughtier Paris. They spoke of "experience" and "sensations" and "seeing life," and when a smile ploughed over his face, concluded that his prudery was vanquished. He saw that they were much less vicious than they supposed: one boy had obviously read his sensations in a book. But he could pardon vice. What he could not pardon was triviality, and he hoped that no decent woman could pardon it either. There grew ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... signify action or habit; as, "Slavery, foolery, prudery," &c. Some nouns of this sort come from adjectives; as, ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... Mr. Ferdinand, casting a glance of outraged prudery upon Mr. Sagittarius, who was attired in his usual morning ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... the life of Cowley; for he writes with so little detail that scarcely any thing is distinctly known, but all is shewn confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyrick.' Similarly Coleridge asks 'What literary man has not regretted the prudery of Sprat in refusing to let his friend Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing-gown?' (Biographia Literaria, ch. iii). His method is the more to be regretted as no one knew Cowley better in his later ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... extraordinary frequency; and indeed by no means whatever can such opportunities be altogether avoided. Since this is so, we must strengthen the child against the dangers it will inevitably encounter, and must be careful not to pervert its imagination by a false prudery. ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... answers, as if there was something labouring in her mind which she either could not or would not impart. I hardly knew how to bear this first reception after so long an absence, and so different from the one my sentiments towards her merited; but I thought it possible it might be prudery (as I had returned without having actually accomplished what I went about) or that she had taken offence at something in my letters. She saw how much I was hurt. I asked her, "If she was altered since I went away?"—"No." "If there was any one else who had been so fortunate as to gain her favourable ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... chastened and reverent mood, it almost takes our breath away when your high-priestess unrolls the last pronunciamento, and tells us her startling story of 'Euphorion!' Why? Ah!—don't you know? The Puritan leaven of prudery, and the stern, stolid, phlegmatic decorum of Knickerbockerdom mingle in that consummate flower of the nineteenth century occident, the 'American Girl', who pales and flushes at sight of the carnival of the undraped—in English ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... by a different rule two printed works, only because the one author is alive, and the other in his grave? What literary man has not regretted the prudery of Spratt in refusing to let his friend Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing gown? I am not perhaps the only one who has derived an innocent amusement from the riddles, conundrums, tri-syllable lines, and the like, of Swift and his correspondents, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... chasten and check the luxuriant overgrowth to which the example and method of the Pleiades were tending to push the language of poetry in French. The resultant effect of the two contrary tendencies—that of literary wantonness on the one hand, and that of literary prudery on the other—was at the same time to enrich and to purify French poetical diction. Balzac (the elder), close to Malherbe in time, performed a service for French prose similar to that which the latter performed for French verse. These two critical ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... fully clothed. One is conscious throughout of a careful anxiety that every avenue to "suggestiveness" shall be just hinted and at once decently veiled. There is something unpleasant, painful, degrading in this ingenious mingling of prurience and prudery. The spectators, if they think of it at all, must realise that throughout the whole trivial performance their emotions are being basely played upon, and yet that they are being treated with an insulting precaution ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... they say, is to make love. We rarely spoke of it. Every time I happened to touch the subject Madame Pierson led the conversation to some other topic. I did not discern her motive, but it was not prudery; it seemed to me that at such times her face took on a stern aspect and a wave of feeling, even of suffering, passed over it. As I had never questioned her about her past life and was unwilling to do so, I ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... on your part. The declaration, without the most indirect invitation of yours, must proceed from the man, to render it permanent and valuable; and nothing short of good sense and an easy, unaffected conduct, can draw the line between prudery and coquetry. It would be no great departure from truth to say that it rarely happens otherwise than that a thorough-paced coquette dies in celibacy, as a punishment for her attempts to mislead others, by encouraging ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... This "prurient prudery" of the vulgar mind was once strongly exhibited in Baltimore. The millionaire Winans had imported from abroad quite a number of classical statues, which he erected in the beautiful grounds around his palatial residence. The ignorant vulgarity of the neighborhood ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... with Miss Redwood and he had clung to it instinctively as he had clung to the vague memory of his mother. No word of mine and no teaching was to destroy so precious a heritage. He was not goody-goody about it. No boy who did and said and thought the things that Jerry did could be accused of prudery or sentimentalism. But in his quieter moods I knew that he thought deeply ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... that Mrs. Thorpe was secretly vain of her child. She had long since, poor woman, forced down the strong strait-waistcoats of prudery and restraint over every other moral weakness but this—of all vanities the most beautiful; of all human failings surely the most pure! Yes, she was proud of Zack! The dear, naughty, handsome, church-disturbing, door-kicking, house-flooding ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... know what you mean by prudery," answered Amelia. "I shall never be ashamed of the strictest regard to decency, to reputation, and to that honour in which the dearest of all human creatures hath his share. But, pray, give me the letter, there is an expression in it which alarmed me when I read it. Pray, what doth he mean ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... artist. And she was a woman. A woman, at that epoch, dared not write an entirely honest novel! Nor a man either! Between Fielding and Meredith no entirely honest novel was written by anybody in England. The fear of the public, the lust of popularity, feminine prudery, sentimentalism, Victorian niceness—one or other of these things ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... handicapped in their locomotion in their own homes is simply a relic of oriental slavery and prudery, and the revolt against it is sensible and wholesome. That they have come to stay is evident, while improved costumes for shop girls, and other women engaged in business every day in the year, are certain to follow in the order ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... giving the heart is one of the last of all laughable considerations in the marriage of a girl of spirit, yet I should like to hear what antiquated notions the dear little piece of old-fashioned prudery has got in ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... chivalry very likely outran the feeling, but they served at least to keep it alive, while the false platonism and ultra-refined sentiment were simply moral protests against the coarse vices of the time. The prudery which reached a satirical climax in "Les Precieuses Ridicules" was a natural reaction from the sensuality of a Marguerite and a Gabrielle. Mme. de Rambouillet saw and enjoyed the first performance of this celebrated play, nor ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... nature of John Bunyan's mind. His was eminently an honest, straightforward, manly, English understanding. A smaller man would not have ventured on Mr. Brisk in such a book as the Pilgrim's Progress. But there is no affectation, there is no prudery, there is no superiority to nature in John Bunyan. He knew quite well that of the thousands of men and women who were reading his Pilgrim there was no subject, not even religion itself, that was taking up half so much of their thoughts as just love-making and marriage. ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... never yet affected any human production 'pro or con.' Dulness is the only annihilator in such cases. As to the cant of the day, I despise it, as I have ever done all its other finical fashions, which become you as paint became the ancient Britons. If you admit this prudery, you must omit half Ariosto, La Fontaine, Shakspeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, all the Charles Second writers; in short, something of most who have written before Pope and are worth reading, and much of Pope himself. Read him—most of you don't—but do—and ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... to try to make clear the importance of such secrecy and confidence between parents and child. There is a secrecy which adds a glamour of pleasurable naughtiness, leading straight to prudery and pruriency with all their consequences. Such secrecy is the sort that develops when parents do take the child into their confidence. Such harmful secrecy is not to be confounded with the confidence ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... been made to her whole relations, from first to last, with Ladislaw. It is not easy to conceive anything more touchingly beautiful than these, more perfectly in harmony with her whole nature. Of anything approaching either coquetry or prudery she is incapable. The utter absence of all self-consciousness, whether of external beauty or inward loveliness; the ethereal purity, the childlike trustfulness, the instinctive recognition of all that is true and earnest and high in Ladislaw, through all the surface appearance of indecision, ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... other Whitehall lovers—a legion of them, from the Duke of Buckingham to the youngest page at Court, she treated in precisely the same way. Was it innocence or artfulness, this assumption of childish prudery? "She was a child," says Count Hamilton, "in all respects save playing with dolls"—a child who refused to grow into a woman, and yet, one shrewdly suspects that behind her childishness was a motive deeper than is usually associated with ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... the moral Almanack of years— The prim old maid, and, by her side, her Niece, Full of bewitching beauty, health, and love. See, how the tabby watches Laura's eyes, Lest they should smile upon some pleasing spark, And violate grim prudery's tyrant ties. With icy finger, she her charge directs, To view the faithful dial of the sun, Whose moral tells how tide and time pass on. See, there—the fated victim of mischance; Read, in that hollow eye, and alter'd ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... to the traditional lost ideals of our organically incorporated class.... Perhaps the most conscienceless class who seek to solve the insoluble is the 'cultured' class. But most of them seem to me like artistic undertakers officiating at the 'wake' of Life. With their platitudes, their prudery, and their chastity, they make for death. These languid ones desire to have life served up to them in many courses. Greed lies at the bottom of their being, and so they preach content to the masses, though for the workers they have nothing ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... purity afterwards grew sensitive almost to prudery. The late Mr. Clough told me that he heard him at Dr. Arnold's table denounce the first line in Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn as indecent, and Haydon records that when he saw the group of Cupid and Psyche he ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... soft eyes dreamily contemplating the opposite pine wood, with that large capacity for perfect idleness common to their species. Bates was chewing a straw and swinging his hunting-crop somewhere in attendance. He went with his young mistress everywhere, and played the part of the "dragon of prudery placed within call;" but he was a very amiable dragon, and nobody minded him. Had it come into the minds of Rorie and Vixen to elope, Bates would not have barred their way. Indeed he would have been very glad to elope with them himself. ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... is conceived with all the prudery and the deep policy about trifles, which marked the character of Elizabeth herself. "Bycause the queen's majesty is a maid, in this case would many things be omitted of honor and courtesy, which otherwise were mete to be showed to him, as in like cases hath been of kings of this land ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... by an assumption of intimacy, a softening of his voice, and a look of tenderness in his eyes, which made her shrink into herself with an instinctive emotion of dislike. But she had then proceeded to scold herself for foolish shyness and prudery—the prudery of a French-school girl, who was not accustomed to the ways of men. She had begun to feel herself very ignorant of the world since she came to her father's house. It would never do to offend one of her father's friends by seeming afraid of ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... impulse surged through her whole being, bidding her imperiously to abandon her ultra-conscientious loyalty to a woman she had never seen. Why struggle against circumstance? If death were so near, what did she gain by prudery? ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... Prudery still affects the valley, Shady and alane, Meeting souls that loveward sally, Icy as a stane. On the mountain true Love singeth, Liberty is there; Dalliance wingeth, Pleasure springeth, ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... potent to bewitch and to command, are a strangely neglected influence in certain forms of social intercourse. English eyes are too often dull and downcast, and wear an inane expression of hypocrisy and prudery; unless they happen to be hard and glittering and meaningless; but in southern climes, they throw out radiant invitations, laughing assurances, brilliant mockeries, melting tendernesses, by the thousand flashes, and make a fire of feeling in the coldest air. And so in Angela's ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... that many of Maupassant's earlier short-stories have to do with the lower aspects of man's merely animal activity. Maupassant had an abundance of what the French themselves called "Gallic salt." His humor was not squeamish; it delighted in dealing with themes that our Anglo-Saxon prudery prefers not to touch. But even at the beginning this liking of his for the sort of thing that we who speak English prefer to avoid in print never led him to put dirt where dirt was not a necessary element of his narrative. Dirty many of these tales were, ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... that moment the marquise behaved to the poor youth with so much prudery, that, loving her as he did, sincerely, he would have died of grief, if he had not had the marquis at hand to encourage and strengthen him. Nevertheless, the latter himself began to despair, and to be more troubled by the virtue of his wife than another man might ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... they seemed a-flame; and he said, "I need not these favours which lead to the commission of sin; I will live poor in wealth but wealthy in virtue and honour." Quoth she, "I am not to be duped by thy scruples, arising from prudery and coquettish ways; and Allah ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... her icy decorum, on the merciless severity of her virtue. Colorless, uninteresting, limited as Continental critics pronounced her to be, we cherished her the more as something specially our own, and regarded the Channel as a barrier providentially invented for the isolation of her spotless prudery. It was peculiarly gratifying to suppose that on the other side of it there were no British homes, no British maidens, no British mothers. And it must be owned that the British mother took her cue admirably. She owned, with a sigh of complacency, that she was not as other women. She shuddered ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... more, to the pure all things are pure, as well as all persons. That which is natural lies not in things, but in the minds of men. There is a difference between prudery and modesty. Prudery detects wrong where no wrong is; the wrong lies in the thoughts, and not in the objects. There is something of over-sensitiveness and over-delicacy which shows not innocence, but an inflammable imagination. ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... such quaint gear would mould her to a youth Fair as Adonis on a hunting morn, Yet she'll refuse! A German prudery Sits on her still; more, kneaded by her arts There's no will left to her. I conjured her To hold aloof, sign nothing. But ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... likely to be aroused than when this is not the case. For the whole subject will have lost the dangerous attraction of novelty. On the other hand, we find boys who have been brought up with great prudery and in complete ignorance of sex matters (save that which may come to them from impure sources) greatly excited and ashamed by the first appearance of the indications of puberty. Secrecy is the enemy ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... fell upon his ear, de Sigognac impulsively tried to kiss the sweet lips so temptingly near his own, but Isabelle withdrew herself gently from his embrace; not with any show of excessive prudery, but with a modest timidity that no really gallant lover would ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... Has she a heart? The ladies of Whitehall Are not so skittish, else does Darrell lie Most villainously. Often hath he said The art of blushing 's a lost art at Court. If so, good riddance! This one here lets love Play beggar to her prudery, and starve, Feeding him ever on looks turned aside. To be so young, so fair, and wise withal! Lets love starve? Nay, I think starves merely me. For when was ever woman logical Both day and night-time? Not since Adam fell! ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... very good friend," Mrs. Peyton assented. She was struck by the way in which the girl led the topic back to the special application of it which interested her. She had none of the artifices of prudery. ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... for forty dollars; in a few weeks resold to an Englishman for five hundred; exhibited at the Manchester Exhibition, whence it subsequently passed into the gallery of a distinguished personage for twenty-five hundred dollars. The "Leda" of Leonardo, repainted from motives of prudery by the great-grandfather of Louis-Philippe, was bought at the sale of that ex-king's pictures in Paris, in 1849, for thirty dollars, restored to its primitive condition, and sold, we are informed, for one hundred thousand francs. Ten years ago, an Angel, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... Severne's habitual self-command, he would have treated this delicacy as ridiculous prudery; but he was ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... (begueules mitigees) the satisfaction of thinking well of the piece in a small trellised box, and then to say all manner of evil against it in public. The pleasure of vice and the honors of virtue, that is what the prudery of our age demands. My piece is not double-faced. It must be accepted or repelled. I salute you, my lord duke, and keep my box." [Footnote: "Correspondance de Diderot et Grimm ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... power of aggression or resistance, and consequently in strange and dreadful peace with each other. The wicked men did not dislike virtue, nor the good men vice: the villain could admire a saint, and the saint could condone a villain. The prudery of righteousness was as unknown as the cynicism of evil; the good man, like Guarino da Verona, would not shrink from the foul man; the foul man, like Beccadelli, would not despise the pure man. The ideally righteous citizen of Agnolo Pandolfini does not interfere with the ideally unrighteous ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... some half a century back to be spoilt by the meddlesome bad taste of Capability Brown, have been somewhat too resolutely robbed of the formal avenues, clipped hedges, and other topiarian adjuncts which comport so well with the starch prudery of things Elizabethan; but they are still replete with grotto, fountain, labyrinth, and alcove—a very paradise for the more court-bred rank of sylphs, and the gentler elves ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... adorer, not the easy-natured, indolent, incredulous libertine whom he had known hitherto as Camusot, but a heavy father of a family, a merchant grown old in shrewd expedients of business and respectable virtues, wearing a magistrate's mask of judicial prudery; this Camusot was the cool, business-like head of the firm surrounded by clerks, green cardboard boxes, pigeonholes, invoices, and samples, and fortified by the presence of a wife and a plainly-dressed daughter. Lucien trembled from head to foot as he approached; for the worthy ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... nevertheless, that much of the folly that surrounds our treatment of sex-questions is due to the pathetic determination of highly respectable people to have no sex nature or impulses at all. Certainly this accounts for much that is called "prudery" in women, whose repressed and starved instincts revenge themselves in a morbid (mental) preoccupation with the details of vice. I am forced to the conclusion that it has also something to do with the quite extraordinary ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... imagined, is of a rare prudery. Wonted as she is to the caresses of periphrasis, plain-speaking, if she should occasionally be exposed to it, would horrify her. It does not accord with her dignity to speak naturally. She underlines old Corneille for his blunt way of speaking, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... man ever experienced, have punished Scott's daring contempt of ordinary laws in the working of his brains.[17] The harm done to St. Ronan's Well by the author's submission to James Ballantyne's Philistine prudery in protesting against the original story (in which Clara did not discover the cheat put on her till a later period than the ceremony) is generally acknowledged. As it is, not merely is the whole thing made a much ado about nothing,—for no law and no Church in ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... all her female friends, and they by degrees begin to sing his praises. At last she yields; a net of subtle influences surrounds her, and unconsciously she comes to reflect the view of society. Her moral prudery begins to appear ridiculous to her, and the so-called common-sense view predominates. The author here, with great earnestness, emphasizes the responsibility of society in weakening the moral resistance of the individual rather than strengthening it. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... "The prudery of the English middle class was shocked at the idea of young women nursing in military hospitals. They considered it 'highly improper.' Others were sure women would be more trouble than help. Many expect their health to fail, and think ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... reflected on these many charms which all centered in our heroe, and considers at the same time the fresh obligations which Mrs Waters had to him, it will be a mark more of prudery than candour to entertain a bad opinion of her because she conceived a very good ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... of life be absolutely excluded? By no means. Our decency need not weaken into prudery. It all lies in the spirit in which it is done. No one who wished to lecture on these various spirits could preach on a better text than these three great rivals, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. It is possible to draw vice with some freedom for the purpose of condemning it. Such a writer ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... made affectionate, sympathetic, moral." But there is in it, as I have said, a touch of sentimentality. If sentiment is properly defined as "higher feeling," sentimentality is "affectation of fine or tender feeling or exquisite sensibility." Heartless coquetry, prudery, mock modesty, are bosom friends of sentimentality. While sentiment is the noblest thing in the world, sentimentality is its counterfeit, its caricature; there is something theatrical, operatic, painted-and-powdered about it; it differs from sentiment as astrology differs from astronomy, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... nature,—but still so void of all the chill of condescension or the subtle impertinence that belongs to that order of the inferior noblesse which boasts the name of "exclusives;" with what grace, void of prudery, she took the adulation of the flatterers, turning from them to her children, or escaping lightly to Lord Castleton, with an ease that drew round her at once the protection ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... properties, which convinced us of her sound knowledge of their physiology, and good qualities, which she explained to her associates with all the familiarity that she would a tambouring frame, or a piece of embroidery. There was no squeamish fastidiousness; no affectation of prudery, in this; but all natural as the pure flow of admiration in a well-bred lady could be. At her most comfortable, and hospitable residence, afterward, she showed us, with pride, the several cups, and other articles of plate, which ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... Sterne that it is a disgrace to European civilization that there exist so few physiological observations on callipedy, and he refuses to state the results of his Meditations on this subject, because it would be difficult to formulate them in terms of prudery, and they would be but little understood, and misinterpreted. Such reserve produces an hiatus in this part of the book; but the author has the pleasant satisfaction of leaving a fourth work to be accomplished by the next century, to which he bequeaths the legacy of ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Derision mock KING HUDSON'S toil, Who made things pleasant greenhorns to allure; Nor prudery give hard names unto the spoil 'Twas glad to share—while it ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... unique chance, in nowise to be missed—and, still more, those obscure hungers, fed by the excitement of this midnight tete-a-tete, rushed her forward upon the abyss; while at every sputtering sentence, whether of adulation, misplaced prudery, or thinly veiled animosity towards Damaris, she became more tedious, more frankly intolerable and ridiculous to him whose favour she so desperately sought. Under less anxious circumstances Charles Verity might have been contemptuously amused ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... paradise for old women; and I am content to be insignificant at present, in the design of returning when I am fit to appear no where else. I cannot help, lamenting, on this occasion, the pitiful case of too many English ladies, long since retired to prudery and ratafia, who, if their stars had luckily conducted hither, would shine in the first rank of beauties. Besides, that perplexing word reputation, has quite another meaning here than what you give it at London; and getting a lover is so far from losing, that 'tis properly getting reputation; ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... surrounded by all sorts of impossible ways of looking at life. How can your outlook be sane when it is founded on a sham morality? You think the body is indecent and ugly, and that the flesh is shameful. Oh, you don't understand. I'm sick of this prudery which throws its own hideousness over all it sees. The soul and the body are one, indissoluble. Soul is body, and body is soul. Love is the God-like instinct of procreation. You think sexual attraction is something to be ignored, and in its place you put a bloodless sentimentality—the ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... human race, and the restoration to dignity and honor of this poor body, so calumniated by the soul. When women all resort to the street—when to perform the marriage ceremony it will be enough to open the window and call on God as witness, priest, and wedding-guest—then all prudery will be destroyed; there will be espousals everywhere, and we shall rise the same as the birds to the grandeur of nature. My criticism on books of the sort of George Sand's has then no value except in the vulgar order of things past, and therefore I trust she will ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... elsewhere in France, away from Paris. But round the Queen, in Paris or at St. Germains, there had gathered not a few of the exiles, gratifying the King more, as it proved, by this compliance than the others did by their prudery. Among these were Lord Jermyn, Lord Digby, Lord Percy, Lord Wilmot, and even Lord Colepepper, though he had at first agreed with Hyde in opposing the removal of the Prince from Jersey. Conspicuous in the same group of refugees was the ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... Supreme Court, says, "If I had been a legislator I would never have voted for this law.... It is evident that mere nudity in painting and sculpture is not obscenity. It is a false delicacy and mere prudery which would condemn and banish from sight all such objects." Public opinion should be directed against the vice society which employs and pays such a tool as Comstock. The prosecution which he instigated against Mrs. Elmina Slenker, of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... worn crepe for my departed virtues for six years, but I throw it aside now and feel a new being whose glad unrestraint may carry her farther than she intended, just as prudery often lends a woman greater cruelty ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... an obstacle in rank the highest or in blood the most ancient. He is authorized by a Howard; and though doubts must still linger about the propriety of such a course, when estimated as a means to a specific end, yet for itself, in reference to the prudery of social decorum, we may now pronounce that to lecture without fee or reward before any audience whatever is henceforth privileged by authentic precedent; and, unless adulterating with political partisanship, is consecrated ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... Angelo, working in an age of literary pedantry and moral prudery, fancied that it was his duty to refine the style of his great ancestor, and to remove allusions open to ignorant misconstruction. Instead, therefore, of giving an exact transcript of the original poems, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... delicate and a great work to do, and you have done it admirably. Be sure that the book will do good. It will shame literary people into some stronger belief that a simple, virtuous, practical home life is consistent with high imaginative genius; and it will shame, too, the prudery of a not over cleanly though carefully white-washed age, into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now) quite compatible with the knowledge of evil. I confess that the book has made me ashamed of myself. Jane Eyre I hardly looked into, very seldom reading a work of ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... will be my first and only gentleman correspondent. After what has passed between us, it would be prudery to refuse. Moreover, I wish to hear often of your welfare. Never for a moment will my warm interest cease, and you can see me whenever you wish. I have one more thing to ask,—please take up your old ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... of the people to all these movements, principles correspondent to them had been preached up with great zeal. Every one must remember that the Cabal set out with the most astonishing prudery, both moral and political. Those who in a few months after soused over head and ears into the deepest and dirtiest pits of corruption, cried out violently against the indirect practices in the electing and managing of ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... &c 884. charlatanism, quackery, shallow profundity; pretension, airs, pedantry, purism, precisianism, euphuism; teratology &c (altiloquence) 577. mannerism, simagree, grimace. conceit, foppery, dandyism, man millinery, coxcombry, puppyism. stiffness, formality, buckram; prudery, demureness, coquetry, mock modesty, minauderie, sentimentalism; mauvais honte, false shame. affector, performer, actor; pedant, pedagogue, doctrinaire, purist, euphuist, mannerist; grimacier; lump of affectation, precieuse ridicule [Fr.], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... wore petticoats of striped blue cloth, and had their arms and shoulders bare, and their ears loaded with silver ornaments. They were merry, laughing, comely damsels, with none of the exaggerated shyness, and affected prudery of the women of the plains. We were offered plantains, milk, and chupatties, and an old patriarch came out leaning on his staff, to revile and abuse the tigress. From some of the young men we heard of a fresh kill to the north of the village, and after tiffin we ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... a harvest as in the treatment of skin diseases. Thus the suppression of symptoms becomes the rule; the removal of causes is invariably neglected. Many forms of skin disease, being the result of sexual infections, are allowed to develop because prudery and other motives prevent the early investigation of the cause, and hence delay its ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... esteemed a piece of ethical prudery, and an ignorance of the laws which languages obey, when the early Quakers refused to employ the names commonly given to the days of the week, and substituted for these, 'first day,' 'second day,' and so on. This they did, as is well known, on the ground that it became ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... captain's tall hat. (He puts the hat down and prepares to jump on it. The effect is startling, and takes him completely aback. His followers, far from appreciating his iconoclasm, are shocked into scandalized sobriety, except Redbrook, who is immensely tickled by their prudery.) ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... from the phenomena of her life, the character of Elizabeth, she necessarily became a type of two great mental struggles of the Middle Age; first, of that between Scriptural or unconscious, and Popish or conscious, purity: in a word, between innocence and prudery; next, of the struggle between healthy human affection, and the Manichean contempt with which a celibate clergy would have all men regard the names of husband, wife, and parent. To exhibit this latter falsehood in its miserable consequences, when received into a heart of insight ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... wayward disposition. But before my years had numbered ten, my parents both died within a few weeks of each other, leaving me to the care of a tyrannical old aunt, who I soon afterwards found, managed to hide, under an artful affection of religion and prudery, a base malignant and sensual character. I was immediately sent by my aunt to the parish-school, where, being naturally tractable and apt to learn I soon acquired the rudiments of a good education, and besides, I learnt also to become an expert needle-woman. ...
— Blackbeard - Or, The Pirate of Roanoke. • B. Barker
... to perform, seem rather to arise from the author's remembering that his hero must do something to support the character, than to result naturally from the situations in which he is placed, and his love of decorum is carried, on all occasions, to an absurd extent of prudery. "Le heros de la piece est d'une sagesse qui a donne lieu a des railleries assez plaisantes," says Bayle; though the instance usually cited—a box on the ear, which he gives Chariclea, when she approaches him in her beggar's dress, under the walls of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... the town and what he regarded as its prudery—he scorned it. He believed he could live it down; he said in his heart that it was merely a matter of a few weeks, a few months, or a few years at most, before they would have some fresh ox to gore and ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... knock out the teeth of policemen as a protest against injustice and violence? [Rising, with immense elan] Your daughter, madam, is superb. Your country is a model to the rest of Europe. If you were a Frenchman, stifled with prudery, hypocrisy and the tyranny of the family and the home, you would understand how an enlightened Frenchman admires and envies your freedom, your broadmindedness, and the fact that home life can hardly be said to exist in England. You ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... to the prudery with which she occasionally covered her conduct,—"In the meantime," said he, "it will be her prudence, to take care that they be not tarnished and moth-eaten, for want of opening and airing, and turning, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... place. You've got to sit by and do nothing for a year or two. It is very difficult. A man cannot afford to waste his time in that manner. There is all Ireland to be regenerated, and I have to learn the exact words which the prudery of the House of Commons will admit. Of course I have made a goose of myself; but the question is whether I did not make a knave of myself in apologising for language which was undoubtedly true. Only think that a man so brutal, so entirely without feelings, without generosity, without any touch ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... Lady Mary Wortley Montague. You have not been witness to the rhapsody of mystic nonsense which these two fair ones debate incessantly, and consequently cannot figure what must be the issue of this triple alliance: we have some idea of it. Only figure the coalition of prudery, debauchery, sentiment, history, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and metaphysics; all, except the second, understood by halves, by quarters, or not at all. You shall have the journals of this notable academy. Adieu, my dear ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole |
