"Not Like Other Girls" CAREY, Rosa N.
$250
CAREY, Rosa N.
[371] pp.
Chatterton-Peck Company
7 1/2" x 5"
w/ 1907 gift (pencil) inscription on FFEP
Not Like Other Girls, by Rosa Nouchette Carey (1884), is an agreeable story of English country town society. Three pretty sisters, the belles of Oldfield, find themselves, through their mother’s unfortunate investments, suddenly penniless, and obliged to earn their own living. Instead of trying to find situations as incompetent governesses, which would break up the family and leave their mother in solitary lodgings, the Challoner girls decide to pocket their pride, and become—what they are admirably fitted for—dressmakers. In the neighboring watering-place of Hadleigh they begin their new life; making gowns for everyone who comes, from the butcher’s wife to the rector’s daughters, and accepting their changed social position with sunny courage. Though they suffer some pangs of mortification, and some trials, they make and keep friends really worth the having; and the story hardly needs the deus ex machina, who appears in the shape of a rich Australian cousin, to make it end happily. The implied moral of the book is the foolishness of conventional standards of gentility; and the story is so entertaining that the reader accepts its dictum as an axiom.