What's the difference between harridan and virago?
Harridan
Definition:
(n.) A worn-out strumpet; a vixenish woman; a hag.
Example Sentences:
(1) But that raised the alarming spectre of a feminist harridan – the worst sort of woman."
(2) If sometimes these women seem more harridans or harlots than heroines, we might remember Anne Elliot in Persuasion: "Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story .
(3) Women are either shaggable or saintly (maternal, married to a male celebrity, silent), or desiccated harridans and shameless slappers.
(4) There was one heart-warming storyline on the Square and that was the metamorphosis of Shirley from hard-faced harridan to almost-thawed mother of Mick.
(5) It was two summers ago that Wendi burst into the news and transformed her public self from harridan to heroine by, with lightning-fast reflexes, blocking a pie attack on her frail-looking husband in the midst of a difficult testimony in Britain before a committee of parliament investigating the hacking scandal.
(6) By the end of the century, he predicted, "the harridans who have been so proud of their spite will be trilling denials at their dinner tables".
(7) I do: my favourites, The Harridan and Relentless Laundry , are witty and brilliantly frank about the humiliations and tedium of life with small children, while brimming with evident love and affection for their offspring.
(8) Personally, I find the long ago move from being regarded as "totty" to "harridan" is a great relief, but I am still sickened by the refusal of so many to challenge the culture in which harassment and abuse thrives.
(9) It’s pitiful that the phrase “middle-aged woman” is wrongly equated with being a moody, barren harridan, and not a woman possessing wisdom born of experience, without crippling age-related physical decrepitude.
(10) This time round, the acting leader Harriet Harman – relentlessly mocked as "Harridan" and "Harperson" by the macho, rightwing press – has ruled herself out.
(11) Over the years, I'd gone from what I fondly imagined to be a switched-on, youngish-minded mum to a rancid, middle-aged harridan, glaring at shrieking texting huddles in the street – youngsters I didn't even know, but would consider lightly birching.
(12) She thumped Tracy Barlow when she was Karen McDonald, Corrie's hoop-earringed harridan, and as herbal tea-drinking lesbian caricature Anne Oldman in spoof A Touch Of Cloth , she took it to its piss-taking conclusion, delivering ridiculous one-liners with a deadpan face.
Virago
Definition:
(n.) A woman of extraordinary stature, strength, and courage; a woman who has the robust body and masculine mind of a man; a female warrior.
(n.) Hence, a mannish woman; a bold, turbulent woman; a termagant; a vixen.
Example Sentences:
(1) The publisher's first move into the UK market came in 1987 with the acquisition of Chatto, Virago, Bodley Head and Jonathan Cape, and later with the purchase of Century Hutchinson and the trade division of Reed Books.
(2) And if not everyone agrees with her, or approves of Virago, or wants to be published by a women-only imprint, so much the better: "The last thing you want to be is a flat old thing that everybody loves, like a big teddy bear.
(3) According to Lennie Goodings, publisher of Virago, the suggestion that in 1857 "bad girls, smut and perversion were essentially invented in the eyes of the law is both a fascinating story and, crucially, an important way of understanding how we arrived at our ideas of normalcy and deviancy – ideas which are with us to this day".
(4) Thorn's first book – a memoir called Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star – will be published by Virago next February.
(5) Goodings, who joined five years later, calls herself "a second-generation Virago" but she was there early enough for it to feel like a start-up: "We were at 5 Wardour Street, five flights up a dusty staircase in one room.
(6) Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present is published by Virago Kate Moses Photograph: PR When I think of The Bell Jar , I do not think first of the story of Esther Greenwood's harrowing entrapment in the suffocating air of her own madness.
(7) Sarah Waters's latest book is The Little Stranger, published by Virago
(8) Spare Rib is a brand actually, isn't it, in the sense Virago is a brand?
(9) She recalls one lunch with a literary editor of the Times who "got there and said [she puts on a patrician drawl]: 'I told all the girls in the office I'm going out with a Virago today!'
(10) It was Taylor's ability to get into the skin of the character, more than the padding and a tousled salt-and-pepper wig, which transformed the legendary beauty into a blowsy virago.
(11) Virago is 40: A Celebration brings together new writing by authors including Margaret Atwood and Sarah Waters , on the subject of 40.
(12) It's only slowly, and in recent years, that the voice of the mother has come out – the odd middlebrow novel of the kind Virago and Persephone rescue ( EM Delafield or Dorothy Whipple ) and more recently Margaret Drabble , Julie Myerson , Rachel Cusk .
(13) The Haunting of Sylvia Plath by Jacqueline Rose is published by Virago Lionel Shriver Photograph: Rolph Gobits I read The Bell Jar as an adolescent, and like most teenagers had no problem identifying with a young woman who had everything going for her – looks, talent, opportunity, with her "whole life ahead of her," yadda, yadda, yadda – yet was spiralling into misery.
(14) Virago has made a profit every year since it was set up ("a healthy profit", Goodings adds, though she won't say how much on an annual turnover that averages around £3.5m), and she is proud of this.
(15) This is, I fully admit, a pretty odd kind of nostalgia, and the person I blame for it mostly is Katharine Whitehorn, whose Cooking in a Bedsitter, first published in 1961, in print and regularly updated for the next 40 years, and now triumphantly reissued in all its original greasy and hardscrabble glory by Virago (I just wish they had made the cover wipe-clean), fuelled it for many years.
(16) Few insiders feel News Corp was a serious contender to take over Penguin, as reported at the weekend, but Hachette, which has Little, Brown and Virago under its wing, is rumoured to be in buying mood and unlikely to settle for a place in the second division.
(17) Like Spare Rib, Virago referenced the Garden of Eden with a logo of an apple with a chunk bitten out of it: tree of knowledge, here we come.
(18) Virago is 40: A Celebration is available as a free ebook at virago.co.uk
(19) "I'm not going to feel defensive about Virago until the Today programme changes," she says, referring to the fact that just 18% of contributors to the flagship news show are female.
(20) Prized novelists include Waters and Sarah Dunant – authors of Virago's two top‑selling titles last year – and Marilynne Robinson, who won the Orange prize for Home in 2009, a moment Goodings cites as a career highlight.