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