Preface to This Collection
Viscountess Viola Vorpel
You will find in these pages fragments, trifles, diaries, myths, ditties, sermons, and other scraps besides. This untidy collection is not a history—it is a ledger of deceits, a satire of pedigree, a love-letter to folly.
Though its pages may glitter with the manners of dukes and the aspirations of gentlemen, it is no volume devoted to their supposed ascendancy. The nobility, as you will see, have long since proved a spent force—decorative, perhaps, but useless as gilt on a coffin.
Of necessity, to prove my point, I have included that ludicrous guide left by my sister Gloriana (in Sydney of all places) to her son Fabrice on the manners and behaviour of a gentleman. If nothing else, it shows that the vestiges of power never disperse; they are merely colonised, altered to suit, and pressed into the service of personal advancement in a society of equally rabble-born folk.
My aim in this archive is to trace the rise to grace of women. The benefits to us—myself in particular—of an education that permitted us to read the Classics in their original tongues are not, as men so often suppose, immeasurable. On the contrary, they may be measured precisely by the discomfort they cause in drawing rooms and cathedrals alike. The true purpose of learning, after all, is not to soothe the existing order but to expose it.
Here you will encounter the arguments that have raged for generations within my family—about how society ought to be conducted, how much ground ought to be ceded to the “fair sex,” and how we have arrived at systems and institutions that diminish gentleness itself.
My sisters, aunts, mother, and grandmother speak from different eras but on the same questions: of education, class, faith, and that delicate warfare between the sexes which men call civilisation.
We are, all of us, women of letters, with the wit and, more importantly, the leisure to pursue our thoughts and record them—though we know how swiftly they may be erased by men, as women so often are.
That is why I have gathered them here: not as a monument but as a weapon, polished and barbed, to be read by any who would know the hidden history of grace.
If I speak of grace, it is not of the divine sort. I mean that human grace born of composure under scrutiny—the art of standing still while the world rearranges itself around you. It is this grace that women have perfected, and that men, in their endless noise, have mistaken for silence.
I dedicate this book, therefore, not to the gentlemen who believe themselves its subject, but to the women who wrote it—often without knowing they were doing so—and to those who will, in time, read it as proof that erasure is never complete.
You are here: States of Grace > Biography