You've come to the wrong board for asking this, my friend. ;) This place is quite a lost colony of people who detest surnames on girls.
I think that
Delaney sounds feminine enough to work on a girl, but it doesn't have any real femininity to it. Laney isn't pretty, nor is
Delaney, in any long-sighted sense; it's simply in the current mode, and the current mode values a very different sort of attractive quality than I do.
I have a weakness for the name Lain, though (not Laine or
Lane or Layne or anything else of the sort), which can be blamed on the anime, I suppose. I think that
Della's a fun little name, too, with a much truer spirit than
Delaney. Where
Delaney sounds like a plastic cowgirl doll in cardboard packaging,
Della sounds like a girl with dusty legs and a muddy hem, if you know what I mean.
Delaney sounds prepackaged to me, like a one-size-fits-all cowpoke name for people who won't even
see wild animals (or even farm animals) regularly but want to think they might.
Instead of
Delaney, I'd suggest
Adele,
Adela,
Della,
Nell,
Eleanor,
Ellen,
Cassia,
Elaine,
Delia,
Daisy,
Billie,
May,
Detta, or
Jane. I'm not sure that any of those would catch your fancy, but I find they all have the integrity that
Delaney lacks in my eyes.
Array
"What are these parents thinking?...Let's name her Madison--she'll live in her own world: 16 square miles surrounded by reality." -- Susan Lampert Smith