Six To Sixteen - A Story For Girls (Paperback) - Paperback

JULIANA 1 0 1 1 LW INGS -- SIX TO SIXTEEN A STORY FOR GIRLS -- MY DEAR ELEANOR, I wish that this little volume were worthier d being dedicated to you. It is, I fear, fragmentary as a mere tale, and cannot even plead as an excuse for this that it embodies any complete theory on the vexed question of the upbringing of girls. Indeed, I should like to say that it contains no attempt to paint a model girl or a model education, and was originally written as a sketch of domestic life, and not as a vehicle for theories. lhat it does touch by the way on a few of the man strong opinions I have on the subject you will readi discover though it is so long since we held discussions together that I hardly know how far your views will agree wit h mine. If, however, it seems to you to illustrate a belief in the joys and benefits of intellectual hobbies, I do not think that we shall differ on that point and it may serve, here md there, to recall one, nearly as dear to you as to me, for whom the pleasures of life were at least doubled by such interests, and who found in them no mean resource under a burden heavier than common of lifes pain. That, whatever labour I may spend on this or any other bit of work-whatever changes or confirmations time and experience may bring to my views of people and things, I cannot now ask her approval of the one, or delight in the play of her strong intellect and bright wit over the other, is an unhealable sorrow with which no one sympathizes more fully than you. This story was written before her death. It has been revised without her help. Such as it is, I beg you to accept it in affectionate remembrance of old times and of many common hobbies of our girlhood in m-Yorkshire home and in yours. and I are sulject to fads. Indeed, it is a falllily failing. By the falllily I mean our household, for Eleanor and I are not, even distantly, related. Life would be comparatively dull, up anTay here on the moors, without them. Our fads and the boys fads are sometimes the same, but oftcner distinct Our present one we would not so much as tell them of, on any account because they would laugh at us. It is this. We purpose this winter to write the stories of our own lives down to the present date. It seems an eguiistical and perhaps silly thing to record the trivialities of our everyday lives, even for fun, and just to please ourselves. I said so to Eleanor, but she said, Supposing Mr. Pepys had thought so about his everyday life, how much instruction and amusement would have been lost to the readers of his Diary. To which I replied, that as Mr. Pepys lived in stirring times, and amongst notable people, his daily life was like a leaf out of English history, and his case quite different to the case of obscure persons living simply and nonotonously on the Yorkshire moors. On which Eleanor observed that the simple and truthful history of a single mind from childhood would be as valuable, if it could be got, as the whole of Mr. Pepys Diary from the first volume to the last. And when Eleanor makes a general observation of this kind in her conclusive tone, I very seldom dispute it for, to begin with, she is generally right, and then she is so much more clever than I. One result of the confessed superiority of he1 opinion to mine is that I give way to it sometimes even when I am not quite convinced, but only helped by a little weak-minded reason of my own in the back-ground...