White lies, polite lies [ Reading & Writing / Communication ]
… manuals thus had to walk a fine line between recommending honesty towards oneself and politeness towards others, while novelists grappled with their characters’ attempts to attain or reject a sociable sincerity that proved to be elusive. … ‘social happiness’ itself, though he, too, excepted lies that were not meant to deceive anyone, such as ‘fables’ and ‘novels’, and, curiously, ‘a servant denying his master’, arguing that ‘in such instances no confidence is destroyed, … Lies: The Veiled Heroine of Sense and Sensibility’, Nineteenth Century Fiction (vol. 31, n° 2, 1976), p. 201. Other novelists also addressed the problem of being either sincere or polite. The plot of Edgeworth’s Helen (1811) is …
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