All 13 Uses of
reticent
in
Middlemarch
- Will's want of reticence might have been met with more severity, if he had not already been recommended to her mercy by her husband's dislike, which must seem hard to her till she saw better reason for it.†
Chpt 4
- His own proud reticence had prevented him from ever being undeceived in the supposition that Dorothea had originally asked her uncle to invite Will to his house.†
Chpt 4
- And on the most delicate of all personal subjects, the habit of proud suspicious reticence told doubly.†
Chpt 4
- The arrangements made by Mr. Casaubon on his marriage left strong measures open to him, but in ruminating on them his mind inevitably dwelt so much on the probabilities of his own life that the longing to get the nearest possible calculation had at last overcome his proud reticence, and had determined him to ask Lydgate's opinion as to the nature of his illness.†
Chpt 4
- It was significant of the separateness between Lydgate's mind and Rosamond's that he had no impulse to speak to her on the subject; indeed, he did not quite trust her reticence towards Will.†
Chpt 6
- There was an emphatic kind of reticence in Mr. Chichely's manner of speaking.†
Chpt 7
- "Ah, you didn't mean me to know it; I call that ungenerous reticence.†
Chpt 7
- So strangely determined are we mortals, that, after having been long gratified with the sense that he had privately done the Vicar a service, the suggestion that the Vicar discerned his need of a service in return made him shrink into unconquerable reticence.†
Chpt 7
- She showed her usual reticence to her parents, and only said, that if Lydgate had done as she wished he would have left Middlemarch long ago.
Chpt 8 *reticence = reluctance to speak freely
- In spite of her general reticence, she needed some one who would recognize her wrongs.†
Chpt 8
- She had no sense of chill resolute repulsion, of reticent self-justification such as she had known under Lydgate's most stormy displeasure: all her sensibility was turned into a bewildering novelty of pain; she felt a new terrified recoil under a lash never experienced before.†
Chpt 8
- Will was very open and careless about his personal affairs, but it was among the more exquisite touches in nature's modelling of him that he had a delicate generosity which warned him into reticence here.†
Chpt 8
- Lydgate too was reticent in the midst of his confidence.†
Chpt 8
Definition:
-
(reticent) reluctant -- especially to speak freelyeditor's notes: Synonym Comparison (if you're into word choice):
Consider using taciturn rather than reticent when the reluctance to speak is a general disposition rather than a short-term situation brought about by particular circumstance.