Winter, Mrs. G.
[ Notes on Alida]
[The Author]
[Chronology]
[Sources]
[Parallel text]
The following is a little more personal than the average Transcriber’s Note. Given the nature of the book, this may be inescapable.
In classical literature, there is a form called the cento. The word does not mean a hundred of anything; it comes from the Greek word for patchwork. In its original form, the cento takes small pieces of familiar works such as the Aeneid and reassembles the segments—anywhere from a few words to two full lines—into a new text. As rearranged, the content can be anything from saints’ lives to outright obscenity.
With rare exceptions, Alida cannot be called a cento. While some borrowings involve single phrases, most range from to paragraphs to entire chapters. I (the transcriber) first stumbled across the book while searching for the originals of some quoted passages in Alonzo and Melissa. This novel turns out to have been one of Alida’s favorite sources, contributing a solid six-chapter block as well as many shorter segments. Appropriately, Alonzo and Melissa was itself pirated; its credited author did not actually write the book. Conversely, a number of other sources were formally copyrighted—sometimes in the same office where the copyright of Alida was filed.
Only about half the sources (by rough word count) have been identified. Isolated phrases—three or four significant words—were disregarded unless they were very unusual, or from a source quoted many other times. Unidentified sources include:
— most of the longer poetry
— discussions of education (female and general)
— religious material, probably from a then-new denomination such as Baptist or Methodist