2 Quotes Tagged: thinness

Very thin ladies, any age, with hand sewing on them, have always frightened me, beginning with a rich great-aunt and her underwear embroidered by nuns. The more bones that show on women the more inferior I feel.

Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.