As I have already explained in the preface to “Union Portraits,” the word “Portrait” is very unsatisfactory, in spite of the high authority of Sainte-Beuve. Analogies between different arts are always misleading and this particular analogy is particularly objectionable. Critics, otherwise kindly, have urged that a portrait takes a man only at one special moment of his life and may therefore be quite untrue to the larger lines of his character. This is perfectly just, and the word “psychographs” should be substituted for “portraits.” Psychography aims at precisely the opposite of photography. It seeks to extricate from the fleeting, shifting, many-colored tissue of a man’s long life those habits of action, usually known as qualities of character, which are the slow product of inheritance and training, and which, once formed at a comparatively early age, usually alter little and that only by imperceptible degrees. The art of psychography is to disentangle these habits from the immaterial, inessential matter of biography, to illustrate them by touches of speech and action that are significant and by those only, and thus to burn them into the attention of the reader, not by any means as a final or unchangeable verdict, but as something that cannot be changed without vigorous thinking on the part of the reader himself.
But “Psychographs of Women,” on the back of a book, is as yet rather startling for the publisher, for the purchaser, and even for me.
Gamaliel Bradford
Wellesley Hills, Mass.
May 26, 1916
CONTENTS
| I. | Lady Mary Wortley Montagu | [1] |
| II. | Lady Holland | [23] |
| III. | Miss Austen | [45] |
| IV. | Madame D’Arblay | [67] |
| V. | Mrs. Pepys | [89] |
| VI. | Madame de Sévigné | [111] |
| VII. | Madame du Deffand | [133] |
| VIII. | Madame de Choiseul | [155] |
| IX. | Eugénie de Guérin | [177] |
ILLUSTRATIONS
| Lady Mary Wortley Montagu | [Frontispiece] |
| After the painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller | |
| Elizabeth, Lady Holland | [24] |
| After the painting by Fagan | |
| Jane Austen | [46] |
| After the water-color drawing by her sister in the possession of W. Austen Leigh, Esq. | |
| Madame D’Arblay | [68] |
| After the painting by Edward Francis Burney in 1782. | |
| Mrs. Pepys as St. Katharine | [90] |
| From an engraving by Hollyer after the painting by Hayls | |
| Madame de Sévigné | [112] |
| After the original pastel by Nanteuil | |
| Madame du Deffand | [134] |
| From an engraving after the painting by Carmontelle | |
| Madame de Choiseul | [156] |
| From a photogravure in Le Duc et la Duchesse de Choiseul, by Gaston Maugras, after a portrait owned by the Comte de Ludre |