"Virago" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inscrutable mystery is that this virago meekly permits the lazy cowbird to deposit an egg in its nest, and will patiently sit upon it, though it is as large as three of her own tiny eggs; and when the little interloper comes out from ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... down the alley, she saw her little one half-dragged, half-carried, by the arm, by a tall, masculine woman, who seemed in a violent rage. Following like the wind, she reached the dwelling of the virago as she entered and dashed the child upon the floor. Just as Mrs. Warburton came up, and was lifting it, the woman had obtained a stout cow-hide, and was turning to lacerate the back of the little one, as she ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... indignation, ire, frenzy; virago, termagant, shrew, vixen, beldame, Xantippe; agitation, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... stronghold the unlucky Rip was at length routed by his [v]termagant wife, who would suddenly break in upon the tranquility of the assemblage, and call the members all to naught; nor was that august personage, Nicholas Vedder himself, sacred from the daring tongue of this terrible virago, who charged him with encouraging her husband in habits ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... great troubles sublimely like martyrs. But if a dusty shoe trod upon a freshly washed floor, or husband or child came tardily to the breakfast-table, or lingered outside the door after regulation hour for retiring—lo, the Angel became a virago, or a droning mosquito with ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... you have me go scolding and gesticulating at every foreign fellow I meet with, and become notorious throughout Elvas as the British virago?" ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... It is supposed that he had laid his domestic concerns too open to animadversion in the neglect of his daughter; or that he was aware that he was standing before no friendly bar, at that moment being out of favour; whatever was the cause, our noble virago obtained a signal triumph, and "the oracle of law," with all his gravity, stood before the council-table hen-pecked. In June, 1616, Sir Edward appears to have yielded at discretion to his lady, for in an unpublished letter I find that "his curst ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... James and his Government are obviously as responsible as he. They might, if they chose, have withdrawn his commission if he rejected those terms. Gondomar was a good Spaniard. He had a patriotic hatred for 'the old pirate bred under the English virago, and by her fleshed in Spanish blood and ruin.' His influence with James was boundless. He could 'pipe James asleep,' it was said, 'with facetious words and gestures.' They were the more diverting ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... unlucky Rip was at length routed by his termagant wife, who would suddenly break in upon the tranquillity of the assemblage and call the members all to naught; nor was that august personage, Nicholas Vedder himself, sacred from the daring tongue of this terrible virago, who charged him outright with encouraging her husband ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... to come storming here, agin a lone widdy, so it is," said a virago, who seemed well able, like the widow herself, to ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... house was reached she went up to the bedroom. Mistress Deborah, entering stormily ten minutes later, found herself face to face with a strange Audrey, who, standing in the middle of the floor, raised her hand for silence in a gesture so commanding that the virago stayed her tirade, and ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... deep water, lay her enemies in smoking ruins. The privateer, her foretop in flames, was dishevelled as a virago after a street fight; while great white clouds puffing out of the frigate's quarter-gallery ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... North, and was besides a considerable tobacco-planter; that her father was very kind to her, but that the old woman, who was not her own mother, treated her very cruelly; that her father married this ancient virago for her wealth, and now repented the rash step, but found it impossible to retrace it, as the law of China allows no divorces excepting when the wife has parents living to receive and shelter her; and the obnoxious woman being nearly a hundred years old herself, this was out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... general; some of them women who have been badly mated, whose own temper, or their husbands, has made life anything but agreeable to them, and they are therefore down upon the whole of the opposite sex; some, having so much of the virago in their disposition, that nature appears to have made a mistake in their gender—mannish women, like hens that crow; some of boundless vanity and egotism, who believe that they are superior in intellectual ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... scorn in her careless perusal of the daily shameful chronicle of domestic infelicity. Then she had coldly wondered if there could be any such men and women. And now! The crowd fell back before her; even the virago was silenced as she looked at her face. The humorist's face was as white, but not as immobile, as he gasped, "Christ! if I don't believe she knew ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... to meddle with me again," said the virago, shaking a stick at the child. "I got to that barrel of cinders on the sidewalk, first, and had put my stick in it, to see if I could get anything out worth saving; of course, if I came first, I had the first right to ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... scared out of his wits, darted from the inhospitable pocket up the chair-back, then leaped to the top of the window, where, feeling secure, he hung himself up to the curtain-rod by his tail, and proceeded to scold, like a perfect virago. ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... Vintage vinrikolto. Vintner vinvendisto. Violate malrespekti. Violation malrespekto. Violence perforto. Violent perforta. Violet violo. Violet color violkoloro. Violin violono. Violinist violonisto. Violoncello violoncxelo. Violoncellist violoncxelisto. Viper vipero. Virago (fig.) drakino. Virgin virgulino. Virginal virga. Virginity virgeco. Virgin, The Blessed La Sankta Virgulino, Dipatrino. Virile vira. Virility vireco. Virtue virto. Virtuous virta. Virtuoso virtuozo. Virulent venena, malboniga. Virus veneno. Visage vizagxo. Vis-a-vis ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... virago rose and stalked triumphant as Minerva, back to some cryptic domestic retreat at the rear. The janitor got to his feet, blown ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... married Mary Lum, a servant girl of great beauty, and something of a virago as well. The union was an unhappy one, as the husband and wife were utterly unsuited to each other. Seven years after her marriage, Mrs. Girard showed symptoms of insanity, which became so decided that her husband ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... explanation. The sounds of common conversation have but little resonance; those of strong feeling have much more. Under rising ill temper the voice acquires a metallic ring. In accordance with her constant mood, the ordinary speech of a virago has a piercing quality quite opposite to that softness indicative of placidity. A ringing laugh marks an especially joyous temperament. Grief unburdening itself uses tones approaching in timbre to those of chanting: and in his most ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... said, her arm immediately flung up to the virago's akimbo and her foot sliding in ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... away a few steps more; Joel followed her up, cutting all around her with the lightning play of an expert swordsman, just missing by the fraction of an inch, and showing a face that quite subdued the virago. Mrs. Steven ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... it so, indeed?" shrieked the virago; "then I am safe, for, little red Kaffir, I shall live to see you and your cowards beaten out of the country of the Endwandwe ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... "at what hour they must come, whether all goes on well, and whether he is satisfied with those fools of parsons (calotins) and the aristocrats." Others consist of low women under the command of Theroigne de Mericourt, a virago courtesan, who assigns them their positions and gives them the signal for hooting or for applause. Publicly and in full session, on the occasion of the debate on the veto, "the deputies are applauded or insulted by the galleries according as they utter the word 'suspensive,' or ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... you, sir?' demanded the virago, dreadfully enraged—'how dare you interfere, you dirty, ragged, vagabond? Come, tramp out of this, both of you, this very instant, or I shall call in them ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... virgin, the prudent wife, or the careful matron, are much more serviceable in life, than petticoated philosophers, blustering heroines, or virago queens. She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice, and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than ladies described in romance, whose whole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... struggling for breath, tore her hat from her head and threw it on the table. Her face was like the face of a virago, her eyes blazed, her cheeks were as pale as death save for one hectic spot ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... same token you must have been letting out any number of queer reminiscences just before I met you. 'Says that a man who would have behaved to a woman as you did to Mrs. Wessington ought to kill himself out of sheer pity for his kind. She's a hot- headed little virago, your mash. 'Will have it too that you were suffering from D. T. when that row on the Jakko road turned up. 'Says she'll die before she ever speaks ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... pulses of his heart, wondered why Robert failed to take the fever from the first breath of contagion that blew toward him. He forgot that there are men who go their ways unscathed amidst legions of lovely and generous women, to succumb at last before some harsh-featured virago, who knows the secret of that only philter which can intoxicate and bewitch him. He had forgot that there are certain Jacks who go through life without meeting the Jill appointed for them by Nemesis, and die old bachelors, perhaps, with poor Jill pining an old maid upon the other side of the ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... "Nay, the virago volunteered," he explained, with a look that seemed to supplement speech in the suggestion that it were best to let Mistress Satchell have her own way. This was evidently Mistress Satchell's own ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... part of Shelley's creation of Epipsychidion (so exquisite in appearance and touching in manner and story as to give rise, when transmitted through the poet's brain, to the most perfect of love ideals) really ultimately became the fiery-tempered worldly-minded virago that Mary Shelley indulges herself in depicting, after first, in spite of altering some relations and circumstances, clearly showing whom the character was intended for. It is true that Shelley himself, ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... swept away the sickly mother and the two eldest children, and attacked Sarti himself, who rose from his sick-bed with enfeebled brain and muscle, and a tiny baby on his hands, scarcely four months old. He lodged over a fruit-shop kept by a stout virago, loud of tongue and irate in temper, but who had had children born to her, and so had taken care of the tiny yellow, black-eyed bambinetto, and tended Sarti himself through his sickness. Here he continued to live, earning a meagre subsistence for himself and his little one by the work of copying ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... forgiveness would be given reluctantly, not forced from her as it were by violence. Now she could only remember the treatment she had received at his hands—the insult, the outrage, and his audacity in thus coming on her by surprise stung and roused all the virago in her. ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... caravan; and runs entirely wild in "Barnaby Budge," where, with a corps de drame composed of one idiot, two madmen, a gentleman-fool who is also a villain, a shop-boy fool who is also a blackguard, a hangman, a shriveled virago, and a doll in ribbons—carrying this company through riot and fire, till he hangs the hangman, one of the madmen, his mother, and the idiot, runs the gentleman-fool through in a bloody duel, and burns and crushes the shop-boy fool into shapelessness, he cannot yet be content ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and as cross as ever. She went around like a virago and scolded nearly every one ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... in that light," said the old lawyer. "It was a deliberate theft from his employers to protect a girl he loved. I do not doubt the girl was unjustly accused. The Squierses are a selfish, hard-fisted lot, and the old lady, especially, is a well known virago. But they could not have proven a case against Lucy, if she was innocent, and all their threats of arresting her were probably mere bluff. So this boy was doubly foolish in ruining himself to get sixty dollars to pay an ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... some epithets upon him, which must have sounded very harsh in the ears of a Frenchman. We stopped for a refreshment at a little town called Joigne-ville, where (by the bye) I was scandalously imposed upon, and even abused by a virago of a landlady; then proceeding to the next stage, I was given to understand we could not be supplied with fresh horses. Here I perceived at the door of the inn, the same person whom I had reproached at Sens. He came up to ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... month;" but the parish registers have been examined for confirmation with "fruitless solicitude." Cunningham gives December as the month of his birth; this is a mistake; so also is his notice of the painter's introduction of the Virago into his picture of the "Modern Midnight Conversation." No female figure appears in this subject. It is in the third plate of the "Rake's Progress" the woman alluded to is introduced. A small critic might here find a fit subject for vituperation, and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... while, on the other hand, it had alone been the presence of the women that had saved her from worse treatment at the hands of some of the men—notably the brutal, black sergeant, Usanga. His own woman was of the party—a veritable giantess, a virago of the first magnitude—and she was evidently the only thing in the world of which Usanga stood in awe. Even though she was particularly cruel to the young woman, the latter believed that she was her sole protection from ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to let the virago pass, Laidlaw proceeded to the court, where, to his great surprise, he found Tommy Splint sitting on a doorstep, not exactly in tears, but with disconsolation deeply impressed on his ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... the virago screamed, "that I am the woman whom you tried to murder, in order that you might ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... extravagances, while it did not prevent her from being gracious to the Infante's many rivals and would-be successors. Bitter quarrels and recriminations ensued, and the jealous ravings of Catarina's princely admirer were more than matched by the fierce sarcasms and shrill clamor of the beautiful virago. One day Don Ferdinand, justly suspecting her of gross unfaithfulness, assailed her with unusual fury, to which she replied by terming him a gobbo maladetto (accursed hunchback). On this the Prince, carried beyond all control, had her ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... The ostler no sooner stept between those menacing antagonists, than Tom Clarke very quietly resumed his clothes, and Mr. Ferret resigned the gridiron without further question. The doctor did not find it quite so easy to release the throat of Captain Crowe from the masculine grasp of the virago Dolly, whose fingers could not be disengaged until the honest seaman was almost at the last gasp. After some pause, during which he panted for breath, and untied his neckcloth, "D—n thee, for a brimstone galley," cried he; "I was never so grappled withal since I knew a card from a compass.— ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... the platform, and wishing to entertain him with edifying conversation while the audience was coming in remarked that they had had rather a trying experience during the lecture of the week before. On Taylor's asking what it was, the chairman answered: "The lecturer was seized by a virago on the stage." He meant vertigo. Dana told good stories of old Dr. Osgood of Medford, whose hatred of Democracy was shown not only in his well-known reading of Governor Gerry's proclamation, but in his bitter ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... one could have been less masculine, less of a virago, than Mdlle. Cardoville. She was essentially womanly, but as a woman, she knew how to exercise great empire over herself, the moment that the least mark of weakness on her part would have rejoiced ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... between weak and strong natures, the superiority of honesty and the moral sense over craftiness and unscrupulous cleverness, are now touched off with a lighter and surer hand. The unmitigated villain and the coarse-tongued hard-hearted virago have disappeared with other primitive stage properties; the human comedy is played by men and women of the upper world, with their virtues and frailties sufficiently set in relief, yet not exaggerated, for the purposes ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... than themselves, he succeeds in traversing the Land of Birds, the Land of Wild Beasts, the country of the Warlocks and the Enchanters, and the Land of the Jinn, and enters the islands of Wak—there to fall into the hands of that masterful virago, his wife's eldest sister. After a preliminary outburst against Hasan, this amiable creature pours, as is the wont of women, the full torrent of her wrath against her erring sister. From the tortures she inflicts, Hasan at length rescues his wife, with their two sons, by means of a cap of invisibility ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland |
