THE
GIRL OF THE PERIOD
ETC.
VOL. I.
[Reprinted, by permission, from the Saturday Review]
THE
GIRL OF THE PERIOD
AND OTHER
Social Essays
BY
E. LYNN LINTON
AUTHOR OF 'THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS' 'UNDER WHICH LORD?'
'THE REBEL OF THE FAMILY' 'IONE' ETC.
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1883
[All rights reserved]
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
Dedicated
TO
ALL GOOD GIRLS
AND
TRUE WOMEN
PREFACE.
So many false reports followed the appearance ofthese essays, that I am grateful to the authoritiesof the Saturday Review for their present permissionto republish them under my own name, even thoughthe best of the day has a little gone by, and otherforms of folly have been flying about since thesewere shot at. The essays hit sharply enough at thetime, and caused some ill-blood. 'The Girl of thePeriod' was especially obnoxious to many to whomwomen were the Sacred Sex above criticism andbeyond rebuke; and I had to pay pretty smartlyin private life, by those who knew, for what theytermed a libel and an untruth. With these passionaterepudiators on the one hand, on the other weresome who, trading on the enforced anonymity of thepaper, took spurious credit to themselves for theauthorship. I was twice introduced to the 'Writerof the "Girl of the Period."' The first time he wasa clergyman who had boldly told my friends that hehad written the paper; the second, she was a lady ofviiirank well known in London society, and to thishour believed by her own circle to have written thisand other of the articles included in the presentcollection. I confess that, whether for praise orblame, I am glad to be able at last to assume thefull responsibility of my own work.
In re-reading these papers I am more than everconvinced that I have struck the right chord ofcondemnation, and advocated the best virtues andmost valuable characteristics of women. I neithersoften nor retract a line of what I have said. One ofthe modern phases of womanhood—hard, unloving,mercenary, ambitious, without domestic faculty anddevoid of healthy natural instincts—is still to me apitiable mistake and a grave national disaster. AndI think now, as I thought when I wrote these papers,that a public and professional life for women is incompatiblewith the discharge of their highes