1910: Preface
Arthur Frederick Blandy, D.Phil. (Syd.), sometime Fellow in Genealogical Studies
It is the peculiar misfortune of all editors of genius to find their labours made the more onerous by the very brilliance of their subjects. Such has been the case with the present editor, to whom has fallen the delicate, nay, thankless task of arranging, annotating, and where possible explicating the voluminous writings left by Lady Espèce deCanard.
Let it be said at once that Her Ladyship was no ordinary recorder of her times. Her pen moved with astonishing velocity across a range of themes that would have exhausted a college of scholars—art, theology, antiquities, philosophy, the natural sciences, even (one blushes to recall) certain metaphysical speculations better suited, perhaps, to the study than to a lady’s boudoir. Yet the erudition displayed in these pages is undeniable. Were her sex other than it was, one might be tempted to call her a thinker.
Unfortunately, her literary habits were as spontaneous as her intellect was profound. She possessed, as so many of her sex do, a lively disdain for the orderly paraphernalia of scholarship. Her manuscripts—if so they may be called—are scattered in every direction, some written on paper of antiquarian quality, others on the backs of old invitations or the fly-leaves of devotional works. Entire weeks appear to have elapsed between entries, and then, without warning, twenty closely written pages appear in a hand so hurried as to defeat all but the most patient reader.
Most vexatious of all is her inattention to chronology. Dates are given erratically, if at all. One feels at times that the calendar was to her an impertinence—an intrusion of fact upon fancy. This negligence, though perhaps natural to a woman of impulse, has rendered the editor’s work of arrangement a formidable one. The reader will therefore forgive me if certain conjectural dating and tentative attributions are plainly noted throughout.
It has even been suggested—by minds more credulous than critical—that the Duchess was not one woman but several; that the great name of deCanard hides, as in the case of our national bard, a syndicate of pens. Such absurd conjectures arise whenever a female intellect shows itself equal to a masculine achievement. The editor ventures to dismiss these speculations with a smile tinged with regret; for if, as seems incontestable, all these writings do indeed proceed from a single hand, that hand was one possessed of rare vigour and rarer grace, a mind both capacious and undisciplined, more akin to genius than to scholarship.
In presenting these Memoirs to the public, the editor has taken every liberty necessary to render them readable, intelligible, and, where possible, accurate. Footnotes have been added sparingly but with authority; speculative passages are accompanied by explanatory glosses; and the orthography of certain foreign citations has been gently modernised in accordance with contemporary usage.
Should any reader find cause to question the tone of these annotations, let him remember that a woman’s genius, like a climbing rose, flourishes best when properly trellised.
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