Elizabeth Longford

Womanly Behaviour

Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

By

Routledge&KeganPaul 224pp £8.95 order from our bookshop

There may be a recession but not in the women business. Our shelves are overflowing with encyclopedias devoted entirely to women, while women’s conditions are chronicled in every century down to our own. Indeed I must declare a modest family interest. Ms Fraser is working on ‘Seventeenth Century Woman’, Ms Billington has published A Woman’s Age, and I am in the midst of reading The Company of Women. With all this going for them, women must surely be well on the way to finding that holy grail of the twentieth century – their identity. If however they have still some distance to travel, this impressive short guide to forty years of girls’ history (1870-1910) will help them forward.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • He weeps by the side of the ocean, He weeps on the top of the hill; He purchases pancakes and lotion, And chocolate… ,
    • 'Half-way through The Conquest of Water I felt as if I had been subjected to the literary equivalent of excessive c… ,
    • 'Volume five, then, but still no end in sight. Sandbrook is clearly enjoying himself so much he can’t bear the seri… ,
    • 'By the end of the book something so weighty, stylish and impressive has been built up that one feels far nearer to… ,
    • 'Her ensuing psychotic episode is described so convincingly ... that the reader will wonder if Dobrakovová did not… ,
    • 'The perspectives complement and contest one another, amounting to a glorious, atmospheric set of ventriloquisms.'… ,
    • RT : I reviewed The Testaments for . I will not be taking any questions at this time. ,
    Follow Us