The Book of Fair Women

THE BOOK OF FAIR WOMEN THIRTY TWO PLATES FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
E. O. HOPPÉ with an introductory essay by Richard King

The Introduction is a product of its time, and the preparer does not endorse its ideas about race. The book was notable in its day, however, for including portraits of non-white women.

“Beauty is only skin deep,” cries Ugliness, pinning her faith on the fascination of the Intelligence. “And ugliness goes to the bone,” Beauty replies, though she fears that that shaft of “wit” must have originally been spoken by a pantomime librettist. “Handsome is as handsome does,” retorts Ugliness, quoting from the Plain Woman's volume of Copy-Book Maxims. And so this battle of words goes on.
But Beauty cares nothing at all for maxims. She puts on her most becoming hat, her daintiest dress, and goes forth careless and indifferent to anything except Middle Age. No shaft of Puritanical censure, she feels, can hurt her. Beauty is its own raison d'etre— its own excuse for being gloriously alive. It needs no apology, no panic balancing of its debit account by moral and intellectual compensations hurriedly placed to its credit. In Heaven, it knows, more people will want to call upon Ninon de l'Enclos than wish to leave cards on St. Theresa of Spain. And what is more satisfying to Beauty than a large audience? Only two things really terrify her—the loss of her Good Looks and the loss of her Youth. That may be the reason why, au fond , she sometimes envies her plainer sisters almost as much as they envy her. Perhaps she knows that they play a waiting game, and that at fifty-five it might have been as well for her had she been born “plain” too, since henceforward she must enter the “plain” woman's world as a stranger, to live as they live, but, unlike them, to be for ever tortured by the remark: “All the same, she was a great beauty ‘ In Her Day! ’ ” It is the way her friends apologize for her false teeth.
In the meanwhile, however, she triumphs—triumphs overwhelmingly. To the purely physical lure Reason is as unreasoning as Lunacy. In spite of that French saying which states that “il faut souffrir pour etre belle,” how often great suffering and great happiness go through life hand in hand, the one utterly dependent upon the other. Only the commonplace “soul” revels in the smug security of the commonplace. Life at its fullest is surely a great joy, as well as a great pain!