#BooksAreMyBag Picture – and Proper Deportment

Here am I in Dubray Books Dun Laoghaire buying the latest Jennifer Johnston and posing for the lovely Jo for #BooksAreMyBag. Try not to laugh too hard at the contrast between the quote and the picture 🙂

Eva got used to some aspects of life in The Links, like the mediocre food and the custom of spending an entire class walking across a room with a book balanced on her head. Deportment was a thing with Miss Hedges. She took it very seriously. Imagine a fine string, she would say, suspended from a height, by which the back of your neck and spine should hang, in a long, graceful line. Imagine you are Coppelia, the doll in the window. Adopt that stance every time you enter a room and when you cross it, and men would respond to that inner grace. Eva, who had thought Miss Hedges a feminist, and who more often than not would find the book sliding off her head and hitting the floor with a thump, took a while to become accustomed to remarks like that. But if other girls’ fathers paid seventy pounds a year to have their daughters do this, it must work… – White Feathers, p. 43