Portraits of women

The nine portraits contained in this volume are preliminary studies or sketches for the series of portraits of American women which will follow my Union portraits. Such a collec...

Lady Mary was not only practical in her household, but in all the other common concerns of life. Few women have pushed their husbands on in the world with more vigorous energy t...

Her friends thought she wished to regulate their lives, especially to regulate them in the way that suited her comfort and convenience. What could be more remarkable than the sc...

It is, I hope, by this time evident, that, whatever her virtues or her defects, Lady Holland was an extraordinarily interesting character. I have quoted from her guests and frie...

On the other hand, what separates Miss Austen from Fielding, what brings her close to Heine, and what almost, if not quite, makes up for all her mocking, is that you feel undern...

But we can detect what she does not show. We can read much, much that she did not mean us to read. And lights are thrown on her by others as well as by herself.

When she was married, she had not many accomplishments. But Pepys wanted a wife who would do him credit and took pains to teach her. Also, it must be added that music was one of...

Yet she wrote only letters and wrote those letters as naturally as she talked. Just before her came Balzac and Voiture, who wrote epistles, after the fashion of Pliny and James...

But all these flaws were nothing to the mother lover. It is, indeed, pretty to observe how, being the keenest sighted of women, she occasionally sees things that she will not se...

By this time it must be very clear that the lady’s worst tormentor was herself. If she could have followed the wholesome advice of her exquisite friend, Madame de Choiseul, she...

Another friendship, of a somewhat different character, but of almost equal interest, is that for the Abbé Barthélemy, the clever, brilliant, sensitive scholar who was dependent...

He was one who well deserved such affection. Sensitive, delicate in health and in feeling, imaginative, finely touched to all the fine issues of genius, his brief life was torn...

Revolt she seems to have had none, doubt none, or only such momentary dimming of the pure flame as serves to make it shine the brighter. It does indeed trouble her a little to r...