A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty

by

E. Barrington

Illustrated with Portraits

Preface

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.

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

Maria Gunning
Portrait by Cotes

Maria Walpole and Her Daughter, Elizabeth Laura
Portrait by Reynolds

Fanny Burney, Madame D'Arblay
After Portrait by E. F. Burney

Elizabeth Pepys