Vain Fortune ... With eleven illustrations by Maurice Greiffenhagen

Front matter

VAIN FORTUNE BY THE SAME AUTHOR. Esther Waters. A Mummer's Wife. A Drama in Muslin. A Modern Lover. Vain Fortune. The Strike at Arlingford. Celibates (shortly). Modern Painting. Impressions and Opinions. 'SHE SLIPPED ON HER KNEES, AND BURST INTO A PASSIONATE FIT OF WEEPING VAIN FORTUNE A NOVEL BY GEORGE MOORE WITH FIVE ILLUSTRA TIONS By MAURICE GREI FFENHAGEN NEW EDITION COMPLETELY REVISED LONDON : WALTER SCOTT, LTD. PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1 89s Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty V PREFATORY NOTE I hope it will not seem presumptuous to ask my critics to treat this new edition of Vain Fortune as a new book : for it is a new book. The first edition was kindly noticed, but it attracted little attention, and very rightly, for the story as told therein was thin and insipid ; and when Messrs. Scribner proposed to print the book in America, I stipulated that I should be allowed to rewrite it.

They consented, and I began the story with Emily Watson, making her the principal character instead of Hubert Price. Some months after I received a letter from Madam Couperus, offering to translate the English edition into Dutch. I sent her the American edition, and asked her which she would prefer to translate from. Madam Couperus replied that many things in the English edition, which she would like to retain, had been omitted from the American edition, that the hundred or more pages VI PREFATORY NOTE which I had written for the American edition seemed to her equally worthy of retention. She pointed out that, without the alteration of a sentence, the two versions could be combined. The idea had not occurred to me; I saw, however, that what she proposed was not only feasible but advan tageous.

I wrote, therefore, giving her the required permission, and thanking her for a suggestion which I should avail myself of when the time came for a new English edition. The union of the texts was no doubt accomplished by Madam Couperus, without the alteration of a sentence ; but no such accomplished editing is possible to me ; I am a victim to the disease of rewriting, and the inclusion of the hundred or more pages of new matter written for the American edition led me into a third revision of the story. But no more than in the second has the skeleton, or the attitude of the skeleton been altered in this third version, only flesh and muscle have been added, and, I think, a little life. Vain Fortune, even in its present form, is probably PREFATORY NOTE not my best book, but it certainly is far from being my worst.