My wife is reading a novel written in the early 1930s by an English author set in a roughly contemporary, say 1920s - 1930s, English setting.
One of the characters declines help from a relative citing that they have pale eyelashes. From context that is not a nice thing to say about some of your cousins. But what does it mean?
The Googles they do nothing.
The best I can maybe possibly piece together from very circumstantial and contemporary 2020s writing is that pale eyelashes are associated with red-headedness. Which suggests to me maybe those cousins have some gasp(!) Irish or Scots blood in them. Holy pedigree failure Batman!
But that’s my guesswork, not anything attributable to a reliable source.
Offhand I can’t think of anybody with Irish or Scottish ancestry whose eyelashes are pale. But reaching further back into British history, the Danes were to be feared, no?
Searching Australian newspaper and book database it pops up occasionally - never as pejorative, but definitely noted as if the reader would have understood something about the person’s (male or female) character, or lack thereof. When used in women’s mags it was a problem to be fixed.
The peak usage is interwar, so its perhaps a English / Imperial middle-class literary thing based around certain standards of beauty, which fashioned themselves away as quickly as they fashioned in?