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More "Prudery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... almost morbid sense of its duty. It more than clothed her, it covered her up as if she had been a guilty secret; there was concealment and disguise in every crease of the awful garment. In its imperishable prudery it refused to define her by ever so innocent a curve; all its folds were implicated in a conspiracy against her sex. The effect, though striking, was obviously unstudied and inevitable, and he argued charitably that Miss Tancred was attired, not ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... But I speak not to you—you need to teach and warn one another. And more than one voice rises in earnestness. And all that women say to the heart that has once chosen the evil path is considered prudery, or ignorance, or perhaps a feebleness of nature which exempts from ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... on in this sullen manner about a mile, Fergus resumed the discourse in a different tone. 'I believe I was warm, my dear Edward, but you provoke me with your want of knowledge of the world. You have taken pet at some of Flora's prudery, or high-flying notions of loyalty, and now, like a child, you quarrel with the plaything you have been crying for, and beat me, your faithful keeper, because my arm cannot reach to Edinburgh to hand it to you. I am sure, if I was passionate, the mortification of losing the ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 by its own ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... HUDSON'S toil, Who made things pleasant greenhorns to allure; Nor prudery give hard names unto the spoil 'Twas glad to share—while it could ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hysterical 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
... the very incarnation of offended prudery, and she laughed at him with a voice like ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... innovations liable to shock staid conservatism or puritanic prudery, you may still, in a good measure, avoid the incongruities which we are now compelled to witness, and make your costume accord with place ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... prudery that in former days practically prevented rational conversation between men and women is fortunately a thing of the past, and the fact that it is no longer regarded as unbecoming for women to take an interest in all the vital problems of the day—municipal, ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... we judge 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
... village, who were very indignant when they found that there were scruples about receiving them. They were so used to their own social observances, that they thought those of the Europeans unwarrantable prudery. ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... danger?" I asked. "Ladies," he replied, ambiguously enough. It thus transpired that his function is to preserve a scientific frontier between the sexes. Considering that the ladies one meets at sea are much more clothed than the ladies whose diaphanous drapery one engirdles in ball-rooms, this prudery is amusing. It is consoling to remember that the Continental practice prevails in many a quaint nook along our coasts, and that the ladies are sensible enough to walk to and from their bathing tents, clothed and unashamed. Strange to say, Broadstairs has placed ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... why we dispute and are not of one mind. We must separate without bringing our struggle to an issue, one must submit to the other. I could take forcible possession of you as I could of any other woman. But what in another woman is prudery, or petty fear, or stupidity, is in you strength and womanly determination. The mist that divided us is dispersed; we have made our position clear. Nature has endued you with a powerful weapon, Vera. The antiquated ideas, morality, duty, principles, ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... here. If you consider it prudery on my part to disapprove of your waltzing with Mr Fitzgerald in the manner you have described,—or, indeed, in any other manner,—you and I must differ so totally about the meaning of words and the nature of things ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... attitude toward the world throughout the evening. Inwardly she longed to be gay like the others, but prudery and short-sightedness, the fruits of her training, prevailed, effectually debarring her from all enjoyment and leaving her cold and isolated like one afflicted with the plague. Could she have followed the dictates ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... 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 ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... 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. ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... have had a 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 fiction—yours, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... take her eye. 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! I doubt a lover somewhere. What shrewd bee ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... jealous of your sister, Le Gardeur," said 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
... occasion, Lady G—— reflected upon a lady for prudery, and was going on, when Sir Charles, interrupting her, said, Take care, Lady G——. You, ladies, take care; for I am afraid, that MODESTY, under this name, will become ignominious, and be banished the hearts, at least the behaviour and conversation, of all those whose fortunes ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... child. And there I found Madame de St. Cymon, and I had to tell her of my failure with Lady Emily and Mrs. Holdernesse. I softened their refusal as much as I could, but I might have spared myself the trouble, for she only retorted by something about English prudery. At this moment a shower of rain came on, and she insisted upon my taking her home; 'Come in,' said she, when the carnage stopped at her door: 'if you will come in, I will give it to you now, and you need not have the trouble of calling again.' I had the folly to ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... shew those, who are unduly familiar, that she can assume, at fit times, a little dignity. But need one, in doing this, build round herself a wall of ice? Shall she, through fear of seeming fond and forward, put on an eternal frown? In avoiding French freedom, we often substitute an Anglo-American prudery. The slightest compliment is interpreted as flattery, so that the remarker must do violence to his honest convictions, lest he offend ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... with his back to it, the second absurd temptation of the night assailed him—to dash on his hat and go to Maurice's, a restaurant of oblique reputation to which his wife had once accompanied him out of curiosity, and which, in a surprising outburst of almost pious prudery, she had refused to visit again. Nor had she ever allowed him to go thereafter himself, and though she had made no dying request of him, he knew that, if she had, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... class, to 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 ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... Azores. All this intuition of which so much transcendental rubbish is merchanted is no more and no less than intelligence—intelligence so keen that it can penetrate to the hidden truth through the most formidable wrappings of false semblance and demeanour, and so little corrupted by sentimental prudery that it is equal to the even more difficult task of hauling that truth out into the light, in all its naked hideousness. Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because they ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... he was careful to say nothing open and direct, by which he should be detected. If ever he ventured so far as to excite serious questions from me, he was ever ready with evasive answers, and had something like reasoning to offer, in defence of his own manners and in ridicule of prudery. He began with caution, but when he had accustomed me to such discourse, and after I had heard it repeated even in the presence of his clerical companions, of which you, Mr. Trevor, were once a witness, my surprize wore away; the pain it gave ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... 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 ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... consoled Eustacie, and she stood intently listening for Veronique's step, wishing that her companions would hold their peace; but the adventure amused them, and they discussed whether it were a blunder of the CONCIERGE, or a piece of prudery of Madame la Comtesse, or, after all, a precaution. The palace so full of strange people, who could say what might happen? And there was a talk of a conspiracy of the Huguenots. At any rate, every one was too much frightened to go to sleep, and, some sitting on the floor, some ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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
... unanxious for the future of her children, has far more instinct for maternity than the poor drudge and mother of drudges of past days could ever have had; or than her sister of the upper classes, brought up in affected ignorance of natural facts, reared in an atmosphere of mingled prudery and prurience." ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... 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
... 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 Parliaments, ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... out his fierce tirades against all earthly joys and pastimes, no matter how innocent they were. To resemble the holy Xavier and the sanctified and childlike Alois Gonzago, was his highest ideal. In the extremity of his piety and prudery he slipped into the art-gallery of our eldest brother and destroyed Titian's most splendid paintings and the glorious statues of the olden time. He gloried in this act, and called it a holy offering to virtue. He could not understand ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... of doors, and air it, if any body by chance sat down on it, and who was known to empty her tea-kettle, because somebody crossed the hearth during the operation of boiling water for tea,—exceeded Mistress Hall in domestic prudery and etiquette; hence it may be well imagined that "shabby people" and the "small fry" generally, found little or no favor in the eyes of the Quaker landlady of "ye ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... 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
... The place of member of the Institute is a real public function remunerated by the State. It is to this cause, and to a few others, which will occur to you beforehand, that we must attribute the character of gravity which literature begins to assume in this country. The prudery of the school of DORAT would here be hissed. Here, people will not quarrel with the Graces; but they will no longer make any sacrifice to them at the expense of ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... served to accentuate this pitiless modesty. Her guimpe was never sufficiently opaque, and never ascended sufficiently high. She multiplied clasps and pins where no one would have dreamed of looking. The peculiarity of prudery is to place all the more sentinels in proportion as the fortress ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases, taken in conjunction with what is known or suspected with regard to the state of morals in the Army, has had the effect of drawing public attention to certain aspects of these problems. The Victorian convention of prudery has to a great extent been discarded. The subject is freely discussed, and it is generally acknowledged that something must be done. There is danger, however, lest public opinion, rightly concerned to promote measures for the eradication of disease, should ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... medicine where the "quack" reaps so great 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 prompt ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... "intellectualized emotion," no "thought 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 ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... 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 ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... Mississippi, fifty years ago—nowhere women more refined, yet affable; so modest, yet frank and open in their social intercourse; so dignified, without austerity; so chaste and pure in sentiment and action, without prudery or affectation, as the mothers, wives, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... by these words, spoken with the glad unrestraint that always carries a woman further than she intended, just as prudery often lends her greater cruelty than she feels. For the first time since that glance, which had, in a way, been the beginning of their friendship, Caroline and Roger had the same idea; though they did not express it, they felt it at the same instant, ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... shared by 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
... this a libel on the English ladies of the 16th century, or is it true—as Bibliophile Jacob asserts in the foot-note to this passage—that "English prudery is a daughter of ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... for a while watching the path down which she had disappeared, wondering at her abrupt departure, which for the moment drove from his mind all thought of McGuire's troubles. It was difficult to associate Beth with the idea of prudery or affectation. Her visit proved that. She had come to the Cabin because she had wanted to hear him play, because she had wanted to sing for him, because too his promises had excited her curiosity about him, and inspired ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... day and the day after, until they parted, he had suffered from the feeling of having tumbled down off some high perch in her estimation. He had not liked it at all; it had made him very angry. Never from that day to this had he thought of it as anything but a piece of wanton prudery. Had it—had ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... 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 ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... sterilization which I described becomes more than a clearly foreseen possibility, the reaction will begin. The great central purpose of breeding the race, ay, breeding it to heights now deemed superhuman: that purpose which is now hidden in a mephitic cloud of love and romance and prudery and fastidiousness, will break through into clear sunlight as a purpose no longer to be confused with the gratification of personal fancies, the impossible realization of boys' and girls' dreams of bliss, or the need of older people ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... the incidents that made me dislike Mr. Sanine. I liked his being honest, and I liked his being down on prudery and humbug. But I thought his theory of life was a good deal too simple. "Don't repress your instincts," he said. That's all very well, but suppose a man has more than one kind? If a cheap peeping instinct says "Look," and another instinct says "Oh, you bounder," which will you suppress? It comes ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... "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, ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... 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 than Mr. Lovelace, or had he ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... 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 ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... [Greek: eis thaen koilian ... eiselthein kai gennaethaenai], and interpolating an expression, instead, which is neither in the original text nor in the thought. Probably Mr. Sawyer's motive for taking this extraordinary liberty was a false delicacy, amounting to prudery; but it ill assorts with his assertion, that his work is not a paraphrase, nor one of compromises, or of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... Charlotte, the day that you become a great artiste, rich, triumphant, idolized, wealthy—drinking, in deep draughts, all the joys of life—that day Uncle Tonnelier will invoke outraged morals, our aunt will swoon with prudery in the arms of her old lovers, and Madame de la Roche-Jugan will groan and turn her yellow eyes to heaven! But what will ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... 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
... contempt for gesticulation, and look upon it as something vulgar and undignified. This seems to me a silly prejudice on their part, and the outcome of their general prudery. For here we have a language which nature has given to every one, and which every one understands; and to do away with and forbid it for no better reason than that it is opposed to that much-lauded thing, gentlemanly feeling, is a ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the middle class in the French Revolution) insisting on a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme. It went along with the decision of the aristocracy to recruit itself more freely from the middle class. It was then also that Victorian "prudery" began: the great lords yielded on this as on Free Trade. These two decisions have made the doubtful England of to-day; and Macaulay is typical of them; he is the bourgeois in Belgravia. The alliance is marked ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 of ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... was absolutely simple and "above board," and this simplicity made him keenly alive to the proximity of the sublime to the ridiculous or the exquisite to the grotesque. Though he had little of the animal in him, and was never troubled by his appetites, he was quite free from prudery. If obscenity moved him at all, it was to frank laughter or to grim contempt; he never dwelt upon it, either in the way of enjoyment or loathing. "For rules of ascetic discipline," says a friend, "he had no need. The view of life suggested by so much ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... made any parade 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 disposed to make, and it helped Paul to understand the hints in ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... 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 respected ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... already 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 ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... 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
... said, mindful of 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 ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... place 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 between parent and child. In opposing the harmful kind of secrecy, there are those who very wrongly, ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... her methods had been a little cruder than Blanche's would have under the same circumstances. The repartee had been simple and the caresses nothing more than a slight touch on waist or arm, repulsed by her with more alarm than prudery. Phoebe was fonder far of Ishmael than of Archelaus; she told herself that she admired Ishmael more—he was so much the gentleman.... What she did not know was that a rebel thing in her, the thing for which poor facile, soft little Phoebe had been as much created as though she had been a field-mouse, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... matrons now of character unsmirched And chaste themselves, are not ashamed to own. Virtue and vice had boundaries in old time Not to be passed; and she that had renounced Her sex's honour, was renounced herself By all that prized it; not for prudery's sake, But dignity's, resentful of the wrong. 'Twas hard, perhaps, on here and there a waif Desirous to return, and not received; But was a wholesome rigour in the main, And taught the unblemished to preserve ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... "What a slave to prudery and smug convention you are," she observed with amused contempt. "Nobody in the University is going to ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... eyes only the changing beauties of day and night; for their ears no sound harsher than the dripping of dew or a bird-song; for them youth, health, beauty, love. And it was primeval love, the love of the first woman for the first man. She knew no convention, no prudery, no doubt. Her life was impulse, and her impulse was love. She was the teacher now, and he the taught; and he stood in wonder when the plant he had tended flowered into such beauty in a single night. Ah, the happy, happy days ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... so. Robert, 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 ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... entrancing words 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 endeavour to ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... the morality of 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 forget all about him. He was sure that he could ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... disagreeable 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 that Ida ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... expect much of her. We expect her to give still greater expression to her feminine spirit—we expect her to enrich the intellectual, artistic, moral and spiritual life of the world. We expect her to demolish old systems of morals, a degenerate prudery, Dark-Age religious concepts, laws that enslave women by denying them the knowledge of their bodies, and information as to contraceptives. These must go to the scrapheap of vicious, cast-off things. Hers is the power ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... more fatal to Esther than the steps taken by Nucingen. The hapless girl, in defending her fidelity, was defending her life. This very natural instinct was what Carlos called prudery. Now Asie, not without taking such precautions as usual in such cases, went off to report to Carlos the conference she had held with the Baron, and all the profit she had made by it. The man's rage, like himself, was terrible; he came forthwith to Esther, in a carriage ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... wonderfully made; while as for his grandeur of form, any college youth who scrambles up him, peel him out of his shooting jacket and trousers, is a hundred times more beautiful, and more grand too, by all laws of art. But so it is. In our prurient prudery, we have got to despise the human, and therefore the truly divine, element in art, and look for inspiration, not to living men and women, but to leaves and straws, stocks and stones. It is an idolatry baser than that of the old Canaanites; for they had the courage to go up to the mountain tops, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... Severne's habitual self-command, he would have treated this delicacy as ridiculous prudery; but he ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... complain of Monsieur de Maulincour, who had given some ground for it during his former intimacy with Monsieur de Ronquerolles' sister, the Comtesse de Serizy. That lady, the one who detested German sentimentality, was all the more exacting in the matter of prudery. By one of those inexplicable fatalities, Auguste now uttered a harmless jest which Madame de Serizy took amiss, and her brother resented it. The discussion took place in the corner of a room, in a low voice. In ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... 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, ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... 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
... well as the love of her admirers, Ninon used all the influence she possessed to regulate their lives and to inspire them with the true desire to perform faithfully the duties of their rank and station. What power over her intimates does not possess a charming woman disembarrassed of conventional prudery, but vested with grace, high sentiments, and mental attainments! It was through the gentle exercise of this power that the famous Aspasia graved in the soul of Pericles the seductive art of eloquent language, and taught him the most solid maxims of politics, maxims ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... of the Englishman's attitude 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 ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... the garden of Beauty is kept By a dragon of prudery placed within call; But so oft this unamiable dragon has slept, That the garden's but carelessly watched after all. Oh! they want the wild sweet-briery fence, Which round the flowers of Erin dwells; Which warns the touch, while winning the sense, Nor charms us least when it most repels. Then ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... 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 ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... 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 ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... An entire intimacy, which seemed to make both sharers of the whole horizon of each others' and of all truth, did not yet make her false to any other friend; gave no title to the history that an equal trust of another friend had put in her keeping. In this reticence was no prudery and no effort. For, so rich her mind, that she never was tempted to treachery, by the desire of entertaining. The day was never long enough to exhaust her opulent memory; and I, who knew her intimately for ten years,—from July, 1836, till August, 1846, when she sailed for ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... frightened when some mad 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
... 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 you any trouble ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... Prosody declared that the wheel of the buggy would certainly be torn off in the attempt, and, losing her usual prudery in terror, whipped off her stockings, and proceeded to wade, to the exposure of a ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... knew each other, and felt like one large family, among whom existed the most amicable relations. A characteristic which distinguished them and which impressed Mrs. Pontellier most forcibly was their entire absence of prudery. Their freedom of expression was at first incomprehensible to her, though she had no difficulty in reconciling it with a lofty chastity which in the Creole woman seems ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... The king, in a fit of good 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 Louis ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... 1840's, where Lola found herself cast adrift, was a curious microcosm and full of contrasts. A mixture of unabashed blackguardism and cloistered prudery; of double-beds and primness; of humbug and frankness; of liberty and restraint; of lust and license; of brutal horse-play passing for "wit," and of candour marching with cant. The working classes scarcely called their souls their own; women and children mercilessly ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... 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, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... 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 ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... climes. Eyes,—so 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 ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... said, "are always trying to turn back the hands on the clock, a most revolting sight in this so-called land of freedom. There is very little hope of success in trying to turn back the hands on the clock. The days of Puritan prudery, the bothersome Puritan conscience, Puritan orthodoxy, and Puritan intolerance have passed, never to return. There is no stemming the tide of time, or the tide of progress, or the tide of culture. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... old-fashioned policy of silence has 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 and a new hope. The evil was ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... was speaking, Julien, greatly embarrassed, obeyed her suggestions, and uncovered his foot. Reine, without any prudery or nonsense, raised the wounded limb, and ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... excursions" unattended, nor go for a ride with a man and stop anywhere for refreshments; indeed, she should not accept such an invitation unless another couple or another girl are included in the party. This is not prudery; it is protection; and any young man's acquaintance is not desirable if he objects to such arrangements. He would not permit his sister to do what he asks some other man's sister to do. A young man loses in respect for a girl ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... people even in those days, and many in these. 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 ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... in dispelling for the moment the charm of her beauty. Her prudery, her deceit, her lies made up to ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... a time with a sudden hauteur and caprice of prudery, which was perhaps one of those delightful little ways to which Thorpe ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... 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 bless ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Passavant saw it as it had originally been, with frescoes still beautiful, though much damaged, and the marble bath still in its place in a niche painted with river gods. In one of the Vatican's periodical fits of prudery the frescoes were completely hidden with a wooden wainscot, the bath-tub was taken away and the room was turned into a chapel. It is believed, however, that the paintings still exist behind their ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... called a fool than a prude, and I think she was right. Prudery is no more a sign of virtue than a wig is of hair. It is usually put on ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... left all other objects in obscurity. Were 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 ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... newspapers. Mr. Michelet's subject, and his late researches, lead him into details, moral and physical, which among ourselves are seldom mixed up with themes of general talk. The coarsest of these have been pruned away, but enough perhaps remain to startle readers of especial prudery. The translator, however, felt that he had no choice between shocking these and sinning against his original. Readers of a larger culture will make allowance for such a strait, will not be so very frightened at an amount of plain-speaking, neither in itself immoral, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... 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 ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... heard from Farwell the story of Mag's adoption into the Storm household, and it had rather shocked him. What was the woman thinking of to surround her young daughters with such influences? Naturally one would not expect prudery, conventionality, from the mistress of Storm, but in his experience quite declasee women guarded more carefully than this the morals ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... Mademoiselle de Voss, and she came of a good house, being cousin to one of the King's Ministers, M. de Finckenstein, and sister of a President of the Chamber. "This beauty, who to my mind is very ugly," wrote Mirabeau, "is a mixture of prudery and cynicism, of affectation and ingenuousness; she has a natural wit of a kind, some schooling, manias rather than desires, a gaucherie which she strives to cover by an appearance of naivete.... All her charm lies in her complexion, and even that I find wan rather than white; ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... his measure; it was no use piping to deaf ears. "Farewell, fair prudery," he chuckled, and in a series of fantastic hops and bounds he reached the edge of the pine wood and soon was lost to sight within ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... to bed. Burlingham drew the curtains round the berth let down for Susan. The others indulged in no such prudery on so hot a night. They put out the lamps and got ready for bed and into it by the dim light trickling in through the big rear doorway and the two small side doorways forward. To help on the circulation of air Pat raised the stage curtain and drop, and opened the little ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... 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 ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... had arisen in 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 background of rippled sea, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... big 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 ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... is sweet as the ocean air, For prudery knows no haven there; To find mock-modesty, please apply To the conscious blush and the downcast eye. Rich in the things contentment brings, In every pure enjoyment wealthy, Blithe as a beautiful bird she sings, For body and mind are hale and healthy. Her ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... ill 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 ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as I like their company, I by no means enjoyed the prospect of receiving them alone: not, I protest, and am sure, from any prudery, but simply from thinking that a single female, in a party, either large or small, of men, unless very much used to the world, appears to be in a situation ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... went over it, frizzling up the bugs that crawled upon it. The woman was a blowsy creature of middle age, who had had a long succession of still-born children. It was a story that Philip was not unaccustomed to: the husband had been a soldier in India; the legislation forced upon that country by the prudery of the English public had given a free run to the most distressing of all diseases; the innocent suffered. Yawning, Philip undressed and took a bath, then shook his clothes over the water and watched the animals ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... gyrating in the centre of their gyrating and unmanageable hoops, cannot avoid, or do not know how to avoid, at any rate do not avoid, the exposure which the short skirts of the ballet-dancer are intended to make, and which, taking to myself all the shame of both the prudery and the coarseness if I am wrong, I call an indecent exposure. In the glare and glamour of gas-light, it is flash and clouds and indistinctness. In the broad and honest daylight it is not. Indeed, I do not know that I will say "almost." Anything which tends to remove ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... piece of acting than that of Miss MORANT in the last scene. But then her revenge becomes absurd when you reflect that FERNANDE is just what ANDRE fancies her, an innocent girl. That is a fair specimen of the way in which American writers adapt French plays. They sacrifice probability to prudery." ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... all. They are not afraid to be gay, and to have enthusiasms. At sixty and eighty a refined and well-bred woman is emancipated in the best way, and in the enjoyment of the full play of the richest qualities of her womanhood. She is as far from prudery as from the least note of vulgarity. Passion, perhaps, is replaced by a great capacity for friendliness, and she was never more a real woman than in these mellow and reflective days. And how interesting she is—adding so much knowledge of life to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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
... 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, that I live in an age not very favourable to artistic ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... from the various wines and bitters. He sat down near the open window while she busied herself in crushing ice to a flaky coolness and gathering the materials. To see her at this job seemed to put all of the solemnity of the occasion far away. Yet he sneered at himself for his prudery. ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... And the poplars, hesitating with dainty reserve, shivered in shy anticipation and waited for a surer call, still wearing their neutral tints, except where they stood sheltered by the thick spruces from the surly north wind. There they had boldly cast aside all prudery and were flirting in all their gallant ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... 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 literally inaudible, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... uncongenial to his own; cold, reserved, and most anxiously prudent in her attention to money, she was of a temper which every day grew worse by the perpetual imprudence and thoughtlessness of his own. He calls her "Prue" in fondness and reproach; she was Prudery itself! His adoration was permanent, and so were his complaints; and they never parted but with bickerings—yet he could not suffer her absence, for he was writing to her three or four passionate notes in a day, which are dated from his office, or ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... we saw, all these things together do not make saints infallible. When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticism or theopathic absorption, self-torment, prudery, scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet the world. By the very intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior intellect may inspire him, a saint can be even more ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... Bonaparte and Eugene, Josephine met Bonaparte at one of the brilliant soirees given by Barras, the first general-in-chief. She asked Barras to introduce her to the young general, and then, in her usual frank manner, utterly the opposite of all prudery, yet none the less delicate and decorous, extending her hand to Bonaparte, she thanked him, with the tender warmth of a mother, for the friendliness and kindness he had manifested ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... her own sex Irene had a reputation for a certain chaste severity becoming at moments all but prudery. It did not altogether harmonise with the tone of highly taught young women who rather prided themselves on freedom of thought, and to some extent of utterance. Singular in one so far from cold-blooded, ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... not 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 ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... the girls, who were obliged to do the honors at table; on such occasions Czipra noisily called him to order, while Melanie cleverly and spiritedly avoided the arrow-point of the jest, without opposing to it any foolish prudery, or cold insensibility;—and how this action made her ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... 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 Mr. Gladstone's leap out of the ministry to follow his book.' ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... schools and free from all the guiles of heartless coquetry, an orphan girl in an Indian village, with neither prudery on the one hand, nor hothouse teachings on the other, which turn the heads of so many girls, Astumastao was to herself a riddle which she could not solve—a problem the most difficult of any she ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... as Amis et Amiles (for passion and pathos and that just averted tragedy which is so difficult to manage, one of the finest of all) and the Voyage a Constantinoble, the single early specimen of mainly or purely comic donnee.[15] This seems to me, I confess, mere prudery or else mistaken logic, starting from the quite unjustifiable proposition that nothing that is not found in the Chanson de Roland ought to be found in any chanson. But we may admit that the "bones"—the simplest terms of the chanson-formula—hardly include varied ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... think, my dear, that I have reason to be incensed at him, my situation considered? Am I not under a necessity, as it were, of quarrelling with him; at least every other time I see him? No prudery, no coquetry, no tyranny in my heart, or in my behaviour to him, that I know of. No affected procrastination. Aiming at nothing but decorum. He as much concerned, and so he ought to think, as I, to have that observed. Too much in his power: cast upon ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... in ery, signify action or habit; as, "Slavery, foolery, prudery," &c. Some nouns of this sort come from ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... the 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 fulfil the responsibility entailed upon them in this matter, they or ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... behindhand in politeness with La Fleur, had taken him back with him to the 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, dogs and cats, besides an old monkey, a dancing: I suppose there never ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... wonderful Renaissance; and in our 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 art and literature. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... 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
... by the introduction of more detailed particulars, the effect of the narrative. The tale is so interesting and so true to nature that its popularity is easily explained. That it became a favourite story, in an age not given to prudery, for reading and for oral repetition, is not surprising. Like all such, it was subject to changes of form and gradual accretions. Oral repetition, as well as non-canonicity amongst the Jews will, to a considerable extent, account ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... 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 Herrick, ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... ladyship. Also, it may be that the novelist's art is injured by the restraints put upon him as many an honest, harmless statue at St. Peter's and the Vatican is spoiled by the tin draperies in which ecclesiastical old women have swaddled the fair limbs of the marble. But in your prudery there is reason. So there is in the state censorship of the Press. The page may contain matter dangerous to bonos mores. Out with your scissors, censor, and clip off the prurient paragraph! We have nothing for it but to submit. Society, the despot, has given his imperial decree. We may think the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... may lie. That an objection was raised to Beardsley's presence in the Yellow Book, though without Beardsley there would have been no Yellow Book, is known and has been told in print, the reason being that Victorian sham prudery and respectability had not been totally wiped out for all the hard fighting of the Fighting Nineties. Beardsley was not slain, he was not defeated, at once he reappeared on the battle-field with the Savoy, Arthur Symons his fellow editor. But by now the enemy never yet conquered on ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... the thousands of many colored open boats (dunga) and palanquin-covered barks (bangla) were fastened along the beach; men and women gathered near the river, in the primitive costumes of Adam and Eve, going through their evening ablutions without feeling any embarrassment or prudery before each other, since they performed a religious rite, the importance of which is greater for them than ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... my girl," said he; "now let us talk sense. I understand that before a stranger you consider yourself obliged to appear astonished at my ways of going on. But he knows all about us, and nothing he may see or hear will surprise him. So a truce to prudery! I came back yesterday, but I could not make out your hiding-place till to-day. Now I'm not going to ask you to tell me how you have gone on in my absence. God and you alone know, and while He will tell me nothing, you would only tell me fibs, and I want to save you ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... 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 ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Clemence dressed herself again, grumbling the while. "Mon Dieu! There's prudery ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... be 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 ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... of an opera is to the libretto: ostensibly a means of interpretation, but actually a means of concealment. The Presbyterians made the mistake of keeping the doctrine of infant damnation in plain words. As enlightenment grew in the world, intelligence and prudery revolted against it, and so it had to be abandoned. Had it been set to music it would have survived—uncomprehended, unsuspected ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... of love, 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 respected ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... of 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
... language, the manners, and even morality itself, branched out into every species of false refinement; their science ran into trivial pedantries, their style into a fantastic jargon, and their spiritualising delicacy into the very puritanism of prudery. Their frivolous distinction between the mind and the heart, which could not always be made to go together, often perplexed them as much as their own jargon, which was not always intelligible, even to the initiated. ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... whit embarrassed. Even in England the drama went very far for a time, and the comic authors of the reign of Charles II., evidently from a reaction, and to shake off the excess and the wearisomeness of Puritan prudery and affectation, which sent them to the opposite extreme, are not exactly noted for their reserve. But we need not go beyond France. Slight indications, very easily verified, are all that may be set down here; a formal and detailed proof would ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... 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 is not prepared for that! At your age, and with your personal advantages, ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... 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 ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... 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, ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... sort of respect for art in general which moves them to accord moral privileges to artists, partly from the very objectionable tradition that the realm of art is Alsatia and the contemplation of works of art a holiday from the burden of virtue, partly because French prudery does not attach itself to the same points of behavior as British prudery, and has a different code of the mentionable and the unmentionable, and for many other reasons the French tolerate plays which are never performed in England until they have been spoiled by a process of bowdlerization; ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... distinctive feature of the Englishman's attitude 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 ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... two, but I'll put a mark on him that he shall carry to his grave. I'll slit his nose and ears, flog him, maim him for life. I'll do more than that; I'll drag that pattern of chastity, that pink of prudery, the delicate sister, through—' ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... rather needless undraping of their beautiful shoulders; while the painter to the Prince was bestowing on the giddy angels of Carlton House a decency that was within a little of dull, a simplicity that was almost sombreness, a purity that was prudery! The beauties of George III.'s court were not displeased to be pictorially credited with a levity they did not dare to live up or down to; and the ladies of the Prince's court, too honest to assume a virtue they had not, ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... 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 sort ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... decision that the lady must, after all, go to bed 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 which would be more in place in a lunatic asylum ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... 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 ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... fidelity of ——-, Lord Byron's fondness for His epitaph on 'Boatswain' Don, Brig of Donegal, Lady 'DON JUAN,' a scene in it adapted from the 'Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno Commencement of the poem The 1st canto finished 50 copies to be printed privately 2nd canto 'Nonsensical prudery' against it Mr. Murray in a fright about it The papers not so fierce as was anticipated Authorship to be kept anonymous General outcry against the poem Spurious 3rd cantos Mr. Murray going to law The author hurt but not frightened A French lady's compliments Third canto The fifth ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... All this intuition of which so much transcendental rubbish is merchanted is no more and no less than intelligence—intelligence so keen that it can penetrate to the hidden truth through the most formidable wrappings of false semblance and demeanour, and so little corrupted by sentimental prudery that it is equal to the even more difficult task of hauling that truth out into the light, in all its naked hideousness. Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because they practise ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... 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 could ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... 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 Louis XV indulged ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... cavern—one step down, another, then another, and there you are in the dark. The clever reascend; fools remain in it. Conscience must not be allowed to practise such austerity. If it be, it will fall until, from transition to transition, it at length reaches the deep gloom of political prudery. Then one is lost. Thus it ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... 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
... Michael 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, he set himself to soften down their harshness, to clear ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... 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 ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... it, the second absurd temptation of the night assailed him—to dash on his hat and go to Maurice's, a restaurant of oblique reputation to which his wife had once accompanied him out of curiosity, and which, in a surprising outburst of almost pious prudery, she had refused to visit again. Nor had she ever allowed him to go thereafter himself, and though she had made no dying request of him, he knew that, if she had, that would ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the influence she possessed to regulate their lives and to inspire them with the true desire to perform faithfully the duties of their rank and station. What power over her intimates does not possess a charming woman disembarrassed of conventional prudery, but vested with grace, high sentiments, and mental attainments! It was through the gentle exercise of this power that the famous Aspasia graved in the soul of Pericles the seductive art of eloquent language, and taught him the most solid maxims of politics, maxims ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... 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
... 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 ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... 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 has, would have found that my doctrine ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... a history: he has given the character, not 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 years. His greatest error of judgement was to suppress his large collection of Cowley's ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... 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 ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... with me wholly, and in so soberly sensible and quiet a manner, as I had imagined incompatible with her powers. Too much and too little credit have variously been given her. About me and my health she was more civil than I can well tell you; not from prudery—I have none, in these records, methinks!- -but from its being mixed into all that passed. We talked over my late tour, Bath waters, and the king's illness. This, which was led to by accident, was here a tender Subject, considering ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... must not be shocked with the word leg, and we are told they put flounces upon those pedestals of pianofortes; but that a lover throwing his arms around his mistress's neck should offend a Frenchman, is an outrageous prudery from a very unexpected quarter. We can imagine a scholar tutored to this affected purity, who should escape from it, and plunge into the opposite immoralities of our ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... "indecent," and should therefore be feared and avoided. It is the defensive weapon of sexually excited, for the most part, slightly hysterical women, against the purely sexual, whose sphere they often extend amazingly. Prudery conceives sexuality as a distinct, restricted complex in consciousness. Such division is alien to woman and, where it exists, a hysterical condition, a condition of inner discord, is clearly indicated. We may take it that the obscene which affects normal men, affects only hysterical, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... 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 between parent ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... the cheeks of the girls, who were obliged to do the honors at table; on such occasions Czipra noisily called him to order, while Melanie cleverly and spiritedly avoided the arrow-point of the jest, without opposing to it any foolish prudery, or cold insensibility;—and how this action made her queen ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... 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 looks, words, or actions, given for no other purpose than to draw men on to make ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... 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 Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... be 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 ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... excite a little uneasiness and apprehension: in his conduct there is nothing to except against. He is a person of strict integrity himself, without pretence or affectation; and knows how to respect this quality in others, without prudery or intolerance. He can censure a friend or a stranger, and serve him effectually at the same time. He expresses his disapprobation, but not as an excuse for closing up the avenues of his liberality. He is a Scotchman without one particle of hypocrisy, of cant, of servility, or selfishness in ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... 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
... and "above board," and this simplicity made him keenly alive to the proximity of the sublime to the ridiculous or the exquisite to the grotesque. Though he had little of the animal in him, and was never troubled by his appetites, he was quite free from prudery. If obscenity moved him at all, it was to frank laughter or to grim contempt; he never dwelt upon it, either in the way of enjoyment or loathing. "For rules of ascetic discipline," says a friend, "he had no need. The view of ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... conjunction with what is known or suspected with regard to the state of morals in the Army, has had the effect of drawing public attention to certain aspects of these problems. The Victorian convention of prudery has to a great extent been discarded. The subject is freely discussed, and it is generally acknowledged that something must be done. There is danger, however, lest public opinion, rightly concerned to promote measures for the eradication of disease, should ignore the essentially ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... 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
... 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 made such a clamor against his ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... her a certain amount of deference, the women seemed to resent her. It was so soon apparent that she had nothing in common with them that they appeared to combine to shock her. Mistress Dearmer led the laughter at what she termed Barbara's country manners and prudery. There were few things in heaven or earth exempt from the ridicule of Mrs. Dearmer's tongue, and it was a loose tongue, full of coarse tales and licentious wit. She was a pretty woman, which, from the men's point of view, seemed to add piquancy to her scandalous conversation, ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... when to elevate the tongue of persuasion, and when to impress her lips with the signet of silence; never converts trifling ceremonies into intolerable burdens; always dresses becoming to her rank and age; is modest without prudery, religious without an alloy of superstition; can hear the one sex praised without envy, and converse with the other without permitting the torch of inconstancy to kindle the unhallowed fire in her breast; considers her husband as the most accomplished of mortals, and ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... 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 ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... Romeo, inasmuch as he is one of my cousins; 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 literally inaudible, my mother, who was ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... marched on in this sullen manner about a mile, Fergus resumed the discourse in a different tone. 'I believe I was warm, my dear Edward, but you provoke me with your want of knowledge of the world. You have taken pet at some of Flora's prudery, or high-flying notions of loyalty, and now, like a child, you quarrel with the plaything you have been crying for, and beat me, your faithful keeper, because my arm cannot reach to Edinburgh to hand it to you. I am sure, if I ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... while as for his grandeur of form, any college youth who scrambles up him, peel him out of his shooting jacket and trousers, is a hundred times more beautiful, and more grand too, by all laws of art. But so it is. In our prurient prudery, we have got to despise the human, and therefore the truly divine, element in art, and look for inspiration, not to living men and women, but to leaves and straws, stocks and stones. It is an idolatry baser than that of the old Canaanites; for they ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... which he should be detected. If ever he ventured so far as to excite serious questions from me, he was ever ready with evasive answers, and had something like reasoning to offer, in defence of his own manners and in ridicule of prudery. He began with caution, but when he had accustomed me to such discourse, and after I had heard it repeated even in the presence of his clerical companions, of which you, Mr. Trevor, were once a witness, my surprize wore ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... duly 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 ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... it had originally been, with frescoes still beautiful, though much damaged, and the marble bath still in its place in a niche painted with river gods. In one of the Vatican's periodical fits of prudery the frescoes were completely hidden with a wooden wainscot, the bath-tub was taken away and the room was turned into a chapel. It is believed, however, that the paintings still exist behind their ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... 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 ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... end in ery, signify action or habit; as, "Slavery, foolery, prudery," &c. Some nouns of this sort come from adjectives; as, "Brave, ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... 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
... duty which should be shared by 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 ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... evening, quite unexpectedly, on the girl 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, and he gave her ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... man's bonhomie, quite ecclesiastical, was instantly disarming. Madame was no beauty, but possessed a certain bizarre charm and was always surrounded. She, however, remained silent and did nothing to encourage her voluble admirers. As void of prudery as her husband, she listened impassively, absently, with her thoughts evidently afar, to ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... and night; for their ears no sound harsher than the dripping of dew or a bird-song; for them youth, health, beauty, love. And it was primeval love, the love of the first woman for the first man. She knew no convention, no prudery, no doubt. Her life was impulse, and her impulse was love. She was the teacher now, and he the taught; and he stood in wonder when the plant he had tended flowered into such beauty in a single night. Ah, the happy, happy days that followed! The veil that had for a long time been unfolding ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... photographed as the sarcophagus of all the Respectabilities, was extremely offensive. And what a drama! Never had these old walls listened to such a tale. Mrs. Vane and others like her had long since outgrown the prudery of their mothers, who had alluded in the most distant manner to the most decent of their internal organs, and called a leg a limb; but the commonplace was their rock, and they had a ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... for the full telling of the story, wherever or with whom the blame may lie. That an objection was raised to Beardsley's presence in the Yellow Book, though without Beardsley there would have been no Yellow Book, is known and has been told in print, the reason being that Victorian sham prudery and respectability had not been totally wiped out for all the hard fighting of the Fighting Nineties. Beardsley was not slain, he was not defeated, at once he reappeared on the battle-field with the Savoy, Arthur Symons his ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... there was much of went by miles; for instance, "miles of virtue." This slipshod style of talk, which the idlers of large towns affect, had just become the fashion in Christiania. All this seemed new and characteristic to the careless emancipated party which had arisen as a protest against the prudery which Fru Kaas, in her time, had combated. The type therefore amused her:— ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... The old-fashioned prudery that in former days practically prevented rational conversation between men and women is fortunately a thing of the past, and the fact that it is no longer regarded as unbecoming for women to take an interest in all the vital problems ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... 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 of ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... 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 ought to be public men appointed for the sole purpose of shouting obscenity ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... guilty of double entendre. A well-bred person always refuses to understand a phrase of doubtful meaning. If the phrase may be interpreted decently, and with such interpretation would provoke a smile, then smile to just the degree called for by such interpretation, and no more. The prudery which sits in solemn and severe rebuke at a double entendre is only second in indelicacy to the indecency which grows hilarious over it, since both must recognize the evil intent. It is sufficient to let it ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... that had tinged her cheeks, mounted to her eyes and descended to her neck. The prudery that was itself a sin had penetrated the armor of her innocence. Without another word, she ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... 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 ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... calineries and consolation, and shawls and scent-bottles, to the unhappy young lady, she would accompany her home. She inquired perpetually after the health of cette pauvre petite Miss Clara. Oh, how she railed against ces Anglaises and their prudery! Can you fancy her and her circle, the tea-table set in the twilight that evening, the court assembled, Madame de la Cruchecassee and Madame de Schlangenbad; and their whiskered humble servants, Baron Punter and Count Spada, and Marquis Iago, and Prince Iachimo, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... (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
... chance—her 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 ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... 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
... submit to rather a severe reproof from her mother, in return for her frankness. Mrs. Challoner's prudery was up in arms the moment she heard of Mrs. ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... 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 checking, as, of course, it ought, this spontaneous motion, modesty ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... rascal you must make him too hideous to show;' and that 'Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art.' Even the attempt to describe, in Pendennis, one of 'the gentlemen of our age, no better nor worse than most educated men,' has startled the prudery of the public for whom he now finds himself writing. 'Many ladies have remonstrated, and subscribers left me, because, in the course of the story, I described a young man resisting and affected by temptation.' Here, again, is another instance of the changes which rules of taste and convention ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... of a 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 they ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... can be no doubt but that the performance will have great uplifting power, and accomplish the good for which it was created. Fortunately, we do not have the prudery in South America that you of the north possess, and have open minds ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... 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 ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... who ever since he had taken part in the regicide trembled in fear of discovery, had nothing to oppose to the empress's desire, and Dona Cancha, whose head was as light as her heart was corrupt, seized with a foolish gaiety on any chance of taking her revenge on the prudery of the only princess of the blood who led a pure life at a court that was renowned for its depravity. Once assured that her accomplices would be prudent and obedient, Catherine began to spread abroad ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... understood it was because in this matter, as in all others, it was entirely unconventional. How far we are, with him, from the fierce or Pharisaic piety of those monks which forbids even the females of animals to enter their convent! His notion of chastity in no sense resembles this excessive prudery. One day at Sienna he asked for some turtle-doves, and holding them in the skirt of his tunic, he said: "Little sisters turtle-doves, you are simple, innocent, and chaste; why did you let yourselves be caught? I shall ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... was of more account than the eleven thousand virgins; when obnoxious persons glided imperceptibly from the world; and no one marvelled if he met the Pope arm in arm with the Devil. How miserable, in comparison, is the present sapless age, with its prudery and its pedantry, and its periwigs and its painted coaches, and its urban Arcadias and the florid impotence and ostentatious inanity of what it calls its art! Pope Alexander! I see in the spirit the sepulchre destined for you, and I swear to you that my soul shivers in ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... natural world, the changeless systems of the universe, as revealed in astronomy or in chemistry, something too of the truth about life, what we animals really are, what our place and what our powers, a truth ungarbled whether by prudery ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... 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 ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... strength, and the truth to 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 ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... and free from all the guiles of heartless coquetry, an orphan girl in an Indian village, with neither prudery on the one hand, nor hothouse teachings on the other, which turn the heads of so many girls, Astumastao was to herself a riddle which she could not solve—a problem the most difficult of any ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... 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 ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... be 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 Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... 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, ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... emotion," no "thought 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 ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the other handicaps she saw fit to throw into the discard, or to 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 ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... occupations of life were gone, but the amusements remained; enjoyment might be protracted to the verge of the grave. All factitious colouring disappeared—death rose like night, and, protected by its murky shadows the blush of modesty, the reserve of pride, the decorum of prudery were frequently thrown aside as useless veils. This was not universal. Among better natures, anguish and dread, the fear of eternal separation, and the awful wonder produced by unprecedented calamity, drew closer the ties of kindred and ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... I knelt beside her to put my scheme into practice when suddenly I was overwhelmed with embarrassment. Would she permit it, even if I could muster the courage to suggest it? Then I saw her frame convulse, shudderingly, her muscles reacting to her rapidly lowering temperature, and casting prudery to the winds, I threw myself down beside her and took her in my arms, pressing her body close ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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 was noiselessly hovering near: night after night my cousin ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... somewhat consoled Eustacie, and she stood intently listening for Veronique's step, wishing that her companions would hold their peace; but the adventure amused them, and they discussed whether it were a blunder of the CONCIERGE, or a piece of prudery of Madame la Comtesse, or, after all, a precaution. The palace so full of strange people, who could say what might happen? And there was a talk of a conspiracy of the Huguenots. At any rate, every one was too much frightened to go to sleep, and, some sitting on the floor, ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cut short 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 short time given ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... any innovations liable to shock staid conservatism or puritanic prudery, you may still, in a good measure, avoid the incongruities which we are now compelled to witness, and make your costume ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... to-day. I do not know even a match, but of some that are going to be divorced; the fate of one of the latter is to be turned into an exaltation, and is treated by her family and friends in quite a new style, to the discomfit of all prudery. It puts me in mind of Lord Lansdowne's lines in the room in the Tower where my father ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... of the sexual appetite in the human mind—Psychic irradiations of love in man: Procreative instinct, jealousy, sexual braggardism, pornographic spirit, sexual hypocrisy, prudery and modesty, old bachelors—Psychic irradiations of love in woman: Old maids, passiveness and desire, abandon and exaltation, desire for domination, petticoat government, desire of maternity and maternal love, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... 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
... in obscurity. Were 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 only ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... Lady G—— reflected upon a lady for prudery, and was going on, when Sir Charles, interrupting her, said, Take care, Lady G——. You, ladies, take care; for I am afraid, that MODESTY, under this name, will become ignominious, and be banished the hearts, at least the behaviour and conversation, of all those whose fortunes or ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... stopped in his measure; it was no use piping to deaf ears. "Farewell, fair prudery," he chuckled, and in a series of fantastic hops and bounds he reached the edge of the pine wood and soon was lost to ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... friendly interest which she herself believed it to be. And I said just now that I was "touched." Cant! Lies! I loved her more dearly than I had ever loved her yet. There is the truth—stripped of poor prudery, and the mean ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... Dame's Art School, to learn the alphabet of the wonderful Renaissance; and in our 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 art and literature. Here, Leo, take your ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of it. No, Rudolph; I can't help it if the vinaigretted beauties of your boyhood were unabridged dictionaries of prudery. You see, I know almost all the swearwords there are. And I read the newspapers, and medical books, and even the things that boys chalk up on fences. In consequence I am not a bit whiteminded, because if you use your ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... 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 profligates and worldlings of the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... 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! I doubt a lover somewhere. ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of the 40 D Act, women and women-like men wallowed in righteousness. Never did I hear more nonsense talked than at the meetings I attended on this subject. Women's instinctive attitude had a unique chance of displaying itself, and one wondered at the combined prudery and sentiment with which the subject was approached, while the most offensive part of their conventionalism was the sex-obsession, which was clotted, like cream turned sour, on ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... that just averted tragedy which is so difficult to manage, one of the finest of all) and the Voyage a Constantinoble, the single early specimen of mainly or purely comic donnee.[15] This seems to me, I confess, mere prudery or else mistaken logic, starting from the quite unjustifiable proposition that nothing that is not found in the Chanson de Roland ought to be found in any chanson. But we may admit that the "bones"—the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the 1840's, where Lola found herself cast adrift, was a curious microcosm and full of contrasts. A mixture of unabashed blackguardism and cloistered prudery; of double-beds and primness; of humbug and frankness; of liberty and restraint; of lust and license; of brutal horse-play passing for "wit," and of candour marching with cant. The working classes scarcely called their souls their own; women and children ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... to himself as he closed the door; "a rival to whom she listens in spite of her bewitching prudery. It is incomprehensible! and yet it has inspired me with new courage; I will not ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... believe that M. Rouher uttered these words, in which there is so much audacity. At that moment M. Rouher did not possess any. Appointed Minister on the 2d December, he temporized, he exhibited a vague prudery, he did not venture to install himself in the Place Vendome. Was all that was being done quite correct? In certain minds the doubt of success changes into scruples of conscience. To violate every law, to perjure oneself, to strangle Right, to assassinate the country, are all these proceedings ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... the columns of the newspapers. Mr. Michelet's subject, and his late researches, lead him into details, moral and physical, which among ourselves are seldom mixed up with themes of general talk. The coarsest of these have been pruned away, but enough perhaps remain to startle readers of especial prudery. The translator, however, felt that he had no choice between shocking these and sinning against his original. Readers of a larger culture will make allowance for such a strait, will not be so very frightened at an amount of ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... positively frightened when some mad 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
... 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
... Michel Angelo are cited as proving that every genius of the first magnitude was a sufferer; and both here and in Germany there are circles in which such derangement is grotesquely reverenced as part of the stigmata of heroic powers. All of which is gross nonsense. Unfortunately, in Shakespear's case, prudery, which cannot prevent the accusation from being whispered, does prevent the refutation from being shouted. Mr Harris, the deep-voiced, refuses to be silenced. He dismisses with proper contempt the stupidity which places ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... lest he himself act fantastically, and now he simultaneously begins battle against commonplace reality. He opposes everything which we are accustomed to understand under the name Philistinism—musty pedantry, provincialism, petty etiquette, narrow criticism, false prudery, smug complacency, arrogant dignity, and whatever names may be applied to all these unclean spirits, whose name ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... straightway to bed. Burlingham drew the curtains round the berth let down for Susan. The others indulged in no such prudery on so hot a night. They put out the lamps and got ready for bed and into it by the dim light trickling in through the big rear doorway and the two small side doorways forward. To help on the circulation of air Pat raised the stage curtain and drop, and opened the little ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... banded in 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 her ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... respects all books of this class are evils: but it would be weakness and criminal prudery—a prudery as criminal as vice itself—not to say that such a book as the one in question is not only a far lesser evil than the one that it combats, but in one sense a book which it is a mercy to issue ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... a 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
... 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
... while she busied herself in crushing ice to a flaky coolness and gathering the materials. To see her at this job seemed to put all of the solemnity of the occasion far away. Yet he sneered at himself for his prudery. ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
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