2018: Preface
Publisher’s remarks
The present volume was discovered in 2018 in a cedar trunk, bequeathed anonymously to a provincial auction house in Sussex. Among its contents were correspondence of uncertain date, fragments of annotated histories and a bound typescript bearing the title Falling from Grace, attributed on its flyleaf to “Viscountess Viola Vorpel (1930–2010?).”
The question mark is not ours. Throughout the work, the Viscountess refers to herself both in the first person and in the third, sometimes as an observer, sometimes as an editor of her own text. She signs a few passages “VV,” others “Vorpel,” and in two places only with the letter “M.” Whether these differences are the result of multiple hands or deliberate dissimulation, we cannot be sure.
Of her life little is known, though oral tradition in certain literary circles places her at Oxford in the 1950s, in Paris during the student unrest of 1968 and in Sydney in the 1990s. The Mallard family—whom she traces with an enthusiasm bordering on obsession—are never once mentioned in official peerage records. Nevertheless, the persistence of her detail, her reliance on genuine historical texts and the fragments of correspondence interleaved with her own voice suggest that some aspect of her narrative is rooted in reality, though whether in blood, marriage or imagination we leave to the reader.
We publish this edition as we found it: incomplete, contradictory and occasionally nonsensical. The Viscountess herself warns against tidy histories, preferring—as she remarks in her marginalia—“to stitch confusion into the seams, lest anyone mistake certainty for truth.”
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