Jade Beaumont is walking down her suburban street going to an interview for a holiday job when she is supposed to revise for A levels. It is a nice day and she is feeling great. She looks back on her years at school and feels quite the opposite because of the school being boring. Jade does not like the suburban life and looks with disgust on the people living there including her own mother. They have forgotten how to relax and how to live! She wants to be independent and intended to pursue a successful career. Au pair girls have brought up Jade and now she is upset because of her mother not being there for her. While walking down the street she sees a child lying flat down on its back on the corner of the next road and a man and a woman crouching over it. The man quickly leaves as Jade appear; she is a woman she is probably better with children he remarks. The child has stuck a lentil up its nose and the exhausted mother asks for help upsettingly. Jade, apathetically, helps the woman and carry her distraught child to the house. She listens to the woman about how hard her life is. Both Jade and the woman are unable to remove the lentil from the child's nose. After a while Jade leaves the house as she is getting late from the interview, while the child still has a lentil up in its nostrils.
             It takes a considerable leap of the imagination for a woman of the 21st century to realize what her life would have been like if she had been born 150 years ago. We take for granted nowadays that almost any woman can have a career if she applies herself. She is independent and stands equal to man in every possible aspect. Women of the mid-19th century had no such choices. Most lived in a state which was only a little better than slavery. They had little choice but to obey men, because in most cases men held all the resources and women had no independent means of subsistence. Lentils and lilies is an English short story, written by Helen Simpson...