Two "Great" Ladies in Literature

"Miss (Dorothea) Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand & wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters, & her profile as well as her stature & bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper."

Such is the fastidious description of dignified feminine beauty at the very start of one of the greatest novels in English Literature, namely "Middlemarch" by George Eliot.

Later, Dorothea, lovingly called 'Dodo' by her younger sister Celia, marries disastrously an elderly dry scholar, enamoured by his learning.

After his death, his conditional will, humiliates her.

When she visits Rosamund Lydgate, an equally beautiful lady, in her carriage & pair, the maid Martha, on enquiry, says "I am not sure, my Lady; I will see, if you will please walk in" in a confused way, but collected enough to be sure that 'mum' was not the right title for this QUEENLY YOUNG WIDOW in a carriage & pair.

Throughout the novel, in spite of her mistaken marriage, her true nobility of character is never in doubt.

The other 'Great' lady in fiction is Melanie Hamilton from Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind." Though her sister-in-law, the feisty Scarlett O'Hara, aspires to be one like her mother, who was a truly great lady, she lacks the character for it. The character Rhett Butler, knowing her inside out, brutally says, "You are not even a lady, let alone a Great one." To rub salt into her wound, he adds that Melanie Hamilton is a true Great Lady. Scarlett thinks Melanie is a goose, but Rhett knows better & goes to Melanie to cry on her lap, when he loses his darling little daughter in a riding accident.