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.

E. Barrington

Table of Contents

  1. The Diurnal of Mrs Elizabeth Pepys
    Had she Read her Husband's Diary
  2. The Mystery of Stella
    Why might not she and Vanessa have met?
  3. My Lady Mary
    To Dispel the Mystery of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's quitting England in 1739
  4. The Golden Vanity
    A Story of the First Irish Beauties--the Gunnings
  5. The Walpole Beauty
    A Tale in Letters about Maria Walpole, Countess of Waldegrave, Duchess of Gloucester, Niece of Horace Walpole
  6. A Blue Stocking at Court
    Why Fanny Burney, Madame D'Arblay, retired from Court in 1791
  7. The Darcys of Rosing
    A Reintroduction to some of the characters of Miss Austen's Novels

Illustrations

Elizabeth Cunning
Portrait by Catherine Reed

Mrs Pepys as St. Katharine
Portrait by Hayts

Esther Johnson, "Stella"
Portrait by Kneller

Hester Vanhomrigh, "Vanessa"

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Portrait by Kneller