Looks and names
Was having a train of thought this morning -
Which started with thinking about physical appearance (which has been coming up in various places) and that line in, could it possibly have been The Female Eunuch, about the benefits to Mary Ann Evans of being plain in her youth and the costs to V Stephen of being beautiful -
And whether, had my darling Dame R been a less lovely young woman, she might not have been caught in the days of her youth like a woodcock in a springe (cite to T Hardy) by H G Wells, however provocative her writings -
And that early photos of her show that she had problem, or at least untidy hair, which one might argue just adds an attractively farouche note to the general image. Indeed, her sister Letty's account book from around that time has an entry for 'brush and comb set for Cissy', which may be elder-sisterly fussing and has to be taken, perhaps, within the dynamics of their troubled relationship.
And then that 'Cicely Fairfield' suggests an entirely different kind of writer to 'Rebecca West' - nice light reading for maiden ladies, and possibly an advice column in a woman's magazine telling girls to beware the pressuring of their boyfriends to 'do wrong', with religious exhortations to aid resistance. (Though it would seem that the name-change was for complex family reasons.)
Is it just the hangover from The Importance of Being Earnest that makes Cicely seem such a girlish name? We also note that The Provincial Lady's dull provincial spinster friend (unlike her fun unmarried London friend, Rose) is called Cissie.
Yet I can think of at least two dynamos called Cicely: Cicely Williams, one of the first women appointed to the Colonial Medical Service, discoverer of the aetiology of kwashiokor, interned in Singapore during WWII where she was women's camp doctor and nutritionist, pioneer campaigner against the aggressive marketing of artificial infant feeding products, and later peripatetic expert on maternal and child health up into her 10th decade; and Dame Cicely Saunders of the hospice movement.
But the name still somehow does not sound fierce.
Or can people change the associations to the names?
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