Friday 20 May 2022

Female authors' comments on female voices

In Charlotte Bronte's "The Professor", an Englishman takes up a post in a Belgian school. His room was next to the playground & Bronte writes his experience:

"I could hear the voices of the children in their hours of recreation, & my reflections were disarranged by the not quite silvery, in fact the too often brazen sounds, which penetrated into my solitude. When it came to shrieking the girls beat the boys hollow."

Dorothy Sayers' in her "Gaudy Night", writes about her heroine visiting a women's college in Oxford. She writes about her experience thus:

"The first thing to strike her was the appalling noise in the dining hall. Two hundred female tongues, released as though by a spring, burst into high, clamorous speech. She felt that if the noise continued for one minute more, she would go quite mad. Within a week, the effect had worn off."

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