Definition of English rose in English:
An attractive English girl with a delicate, fair-skinned complexion regarded as typically English.
- Even her image as the sexy English rose is more complex than it appears at first sight.
- Lastly, although she seems to be an English rose, her father was Irish (rather romantically descended from a Celtic chieftain) and she spent much of her childhood in Ireland, which was where her love of plants began.
- To a Victorian audience it would have been even more moving, for on close inspection she is no Greek maiden, but a late-Victorian English rose whose predicament is straight from the pages of a penny dreadful or pocket novella.
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