The aim of these stories is not historical exactitude nor unbending
accuracy in dates or juxtaposition. They are rather an attempt to
re-create the personalities of a succession of charming women, ranging
from Elizabeth Pepys, wife of the Diarist, to Fanny Burney and her
experiences at the Court of Queen Charlotte. As I have imagined them, so I
have set them forth, and if what is written can at all revive their
perished grace and the unfading delight of days that now belong to the
ages, and to men no more, I shall not have failed. Much is imagination,
more is truth, but which is which I scarcely can tell myself. I have
wished to set them in other circumstances than those we know.
What would Elizabeth Pepys have felt if she had read the secrets of the
Diary? If Stella and Vanessa had met--Ah, that is a tenderness and terror
almost beyond all thinking! How would my Lady Mary's smarting pride have
blistered herself and others if the Fleet marriage of her eccentric
son--whose wife she never saw--had actually come between the wind and her
nobility? Was there no finer, more ethereal touch in Elizabeth Gunning's
stolen marriage with her Duke than is recorded in Horace Walpole's
malicious gossip? Could such beauty have been utterly sordid? What were
the fears and hopes of the lovely Maria Walpole as, after long concealment
of her marriage, she trembled on the steps of a throne? How did those
about her judge of Fanny Burney in the Digby affair? Did she wholly
conceal her heart? From her Diary we know what she wished to feel--very
certainly not entirely what she felt.
Perhaps of all these women we know best that Elizabeth who never
lived--Elizabeth Bennet. She is the most real because her inner being is
laid open to us by her great creator. I have not dared to touch her save
as a shadow picture in the background of the quiet English country-life
which now is gone for ever. But her fragrance--stimulating rather than
sweet, like lavender and rosemary--could not be forgotten in any picture
of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries and among the women
whom all the world remembers. They, one and all, can only move in
dreamland now. Their lives are but stories in a printed book, and a
heroine of Jane Austen's is as real as Stella or the fair Walpole. So I
apologise for nothing. I have dreamed. I may hope that others will dream
with me.