R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

58 Walter de la MareChannel Islands. Bluestockings in those days, we aretold also, wore a fringe and spelt humanity with a big H.Clementina's lively appearance does not suggest anythingvery formidable. She has reddish brown eyes,reddish brown hair with a golden tint 'probably due toAuricomus Fluid at twenty-one shillings and sixpence abottle', very black lashes and eyebrows, aided it may beby 'antimony and a pencil', and she is wearing for awalk along the sea-shore 'a skirt, O, so narrow that itwould take a year's study to learn to walk in it at all;a fan-shaped train carried over one arm', and a MotherHubbard hat.The New Woman, though, maybe, as yet unlabelled,was not unknown. She, too, in the guise of a 'writingwoman' named Mattie Rivers, appears in the same novelas ' the customary accessory' of a smart yachting cruise.She is described as 'an emancipated sister of twentynine,with a cavalier hat worn distinctly... over one ear,a rakish-looking double eye-glass, a cane... a palpableodour of Havana smoke clinging to her gentlemanlyyachting-jacket, and short-clipped, gentlemanly hair'.But even if the Havana smoke was of her own making,the heralds of the Keynote Series were in Mattie's daystill in their nurseries, only playing with pen and ink, andit was not until the end of the century that the ' sex-problem'—dismallest, surely, of all drab phrases—had become,according to Mrs Oliphant, 'the chief occupation offiction', and that Mrs Linton could refer to 'unveiledpresentations of the sexual instincts which seem to makethe world one large lupanar'—a term which I was relievedto find no trace of in The {Concise) Oxford Dictionary.However that may be, the novels written by womenin the 'seventies were still for the most part either lovestories, not very subtle, perhaps, but simple, and notusually sensuous, or passionate; or they were tales like