Types of Young Ladies
… From Charles Dickens’ and Edward Caswall’s recently rereleased Sketches of Young Gentlemen and Young Couples: With Sketches of Young Ladies by Edward Caswall. (The strange title has an interesting backstory.) For instance, the Extremely Natural Young Lady is “always doing some out-of-the-way-thing, that she might appear simple and girlish … She enjoys nothing so much as getting her gown torn and arranging her hair out of doors.”
And then there’s the Manly Young Lady, who, “should you sit next to her at dinner, ten to one but she puts you down half a dozen times at least.” There’s a dozen additional types of ladies — the Lazy Young Lady among them — viewable in the book’s table of contents, if you’d like to try to divine your secret self from 1830s-era vignettes.
(All this comes via Michelle Legro, a Clever and Mysterious Young Lady, writing for Brain Pickings.)