THE MODERN GIRL

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1536, 7 August 1901, Page 20

THE MODERN GIRL

Mrs L. T. ]\leade has been giving to “Great Thoughts” some of her ideas regarding the modern girl. Asked whether there had been much change in the literary tastes of girls during the last thirty years. “Very great/’ was Mrs Meade’s reply. “They require much more excitement and movement in girls’ books nowadays. You won’t get a girl, except with great difficulty, to read Miss Charlotte Yonge, and yet think how “The Heir of Redclyffe’ was the rage in my girlhood. Her books, they say, have too many characters, and girls now have no time to bother over them. The honest truth of the matter is, I think, tnat people

nowadays, with all their veneer ofsmarfc. ness, and quickness; and movement, aie very lazy. And they are very excuable ; they want dash, and movement at once-”

As far as deep books go, however, it is Mrs Meade’s opinion that gir.s itvd much more deeply' than they used to do.

Mrs Meade believes it to be pcs? b:e for women to be so over-educated as

to lose they orignalifcy: “I think that education destroys imagination to a great extent. The dullest person I know is the ordinary hign school girl. She has classed everything iiito a groove, and is frightfully narrow. I have frequently found it so in my intercourse with girls. . . . There is too much rush in to-day’s education. Young lives are destroyed by severe examinations.”

Working for a living, Mrs Meade added, must benefit feminine character because it makes a woman brave. “But I own the girl of to-day is more brusque, and that she has lost a certain superficial refinement, but she has gained truer ancl finer qualities.”