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Twenty Years Old: Rose 1
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Rose 20

She was not a pretty girl. Distinctly, no. But there was a rather sweet fragility about her, and an almost desperate timidity that Mr. Durant had once found engaging, but that he now thought of with a prickling irritation. She was twenty, and the glamour of youth was around her. When she bent over her work, her back showing white through her sleazy blouse, her clean hair coiled smoothly on her thin neck, her straight, childish legs crossed at the knee to support her pad, she had an undeniable appeal.

But not pretty – no. Her hair wasn’t the kind that went up well, her eyelashes and lips were too pale, she hadn’t much knack about choosing and wearing her cheap clothes. Mr. Durant, in reviewing the thing, felt a surprise that she should have ever have attracted him. But it was a tolerant surprise, not an impatient one. Already he looked back at himself as being just a big boy in the whole affair.

Dorothy Parker  ·  'Mr. Durant'

20

Meg Bailey

Don't Look at Me Like That

Diana Athill

"I knew that there was no “of course” about it at my age..."

20

Jane Graham

The L-Shaped Room

Lynne Reid Banks

"Where to begin? In fairness to myself, eight years ago, when I was twenty and in love with the actor, in that repertory up North..."

20

Pansy Osmond

The Portrait of a Lady

Henry James

"She could not teach herself to think favourably of Pansy, whose absence of initiative, of conversation, of personal claims, seemed to her, in a girl of twenty, unnatural and even uncanny..."

20

Liza Bogolepov

Pnin

Vladimir Nabokov

"Liza Bogolepov, a medical student just turned twenty, and perfectly charming in her black silk jumper and tailor-made skirt..."

20

Rachel Noyes

The Rachel Papers

Martin Amis

"You’re twenty, for fuck’s sake..."

20

Elizabeth

A Woman of My Age

Nina Bawden

"Since I was twenty years old and had had some success in college debating societies, this possibility did not strike me as remote...."

20

Emma Woodhouse

Emma

Jane Austen

"The real evils, indeed, of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself..."

20

Esther Greenwood

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

"We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream..."

20

Polly Hampton

Love in a Cold Climate

Nancy Mitford

"'...why not make the most of being a girl? You’ll never be one again. You’re only twenty. Why be in such a hurry to change?’"