Dorothy Delafield

Preface

W HILE sitting in the Roman Forum, one October morning, trying to gain a lasting impression of its architectural fragments, my thoughts reverted to Dorothy Delafield^ still in need of an introduction to the reader.

I had stood on the Julian Rostra, endeavoring to people the dilapidated market-place with the ambitious life and movement of imperial Rome. But imagination was powerless in the material presence of a past, that mutely, but emphatically, reiterated the brokenness and finiteness of a dominion so proud that it even apotheosized its heroes. Turn which way my eyes would, fragments only remained, each epitomizing the utter inability of a nation that had conquered the world to achieve a dramatic unity in its history.

In writing Dorothy Dela fields I realized that it would be both foolish and untrue to present even a single life as embodying a dramatic harmony of endowment, environment, and achievement.

Every individual life, as well as every national life, includes a series of recessions and advances ; in a few there is a seeming culmination with which, however, the conclusion is oftener inconsistent than consistent. Dorothy Delafield^ therefore, presents fragments from several lives, romantic or realistic, according to the reader’s point of view.

The heroine is an American girl, with an essentially American experience. As a very young girl, she supposes herself to be acting from her deepest intellectual convictions. As a young woman, she perceives that her supposed intellectual convictions are theories, and as much theories of others as her own. She is purposely left where every woman of the nineteenth century will

Preface.

have to be left, until that century or some other gives the final answer to questions which Dorothy practically and immediately tried to answer, and questions most likely to attract and stimulate girls with a high and rare spiritual endowment.

The author knows, no more than the reader, whether Dorothy Delafield was like a wandering star seeking instinctively to regain a lost and harmonious orbit, or whether she, in common with many another of those finer womanly organizations, the direct product of American life and teaching, will, in the generations to come, be considered as comets shining for a little time with meteoric brilliancy.

Whatever may be the issue of this period of womanly endeavor, whether it shall be proven, on the whole, an advancement or a recession, the verdict of the future must be that the quickening of the intellectual and spiritual aspiration of American women of the nineteenth century testify as signally to national progress and prosperity as the spotless purity and commanding influence of the vestal virgins illustrated the glory of imperial Rome.

Ellice is intended to express the opposite of Dorothy, and, like Dorothy, after garnering a few personal experiences, to formulate new theories and principles of action.

Incidentally the story depicts the life of an American village in the East, and the evils resulting from a monopoly.

The author presents Dorothy Delafield to the reader, hoping that earnest girls and Christian mothers will love her, and that any woman who has acted courageously, according to her convictions, will gain fresh inspiration, since Dorothy, although treading a thorny path, plucked many a rose from the way-side.

Mary Harriott Norris.

Rome, Italy, October^ i886.

DOROTHY DELAFIELD.