The Making of a Marchioness

The Making of a Marchioness (1901) was one of Nancy Mitford's favourite books; in The Pursuit of Love, Linda puts a copy of it in the window of the Red bookshop, where she works, in place of Karl Marx: the Formative Years. Today, a number of US college courses teach it alongside Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. It is indeed a remarkably good read from this most beloved author of The Secret Garden, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Persephone favourite The Shuttle. Like Miss Pettigrew in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, the heroine of The Making of a Marchioness 'is a sort of Cinderella,' wrote Frances Hodgson Burnett to her publisher, 'a solid, kind, unselfish creature who arrives at a good fortune almost comic because it is in a sense so incongruous.'

Emily Fox-Seton never imagines her life will change: she is quite content living in a bedsitting room in Mortimer Street in Marylebone and supporting herself. "It is her fate to be a woman who is perfectly well born, and who is as penniless as a charwoman, and works like one. She is at the beck and call of any one who will give her an odd job to earn a meal with. That is one of the new ways women have found of making a living." She is contrasted with a society beauty, Lady Agatha Slade, who is also poor but can do nothing but wait for a husband. "She has had the advertising of the illustrated papers this season, and she has gone well. But she has not had any special offer, and I know she and her mother are a little frightened." 

Endpaper

The endpaper fabric is a 1901 figured cotton called 'Tulips', which is simple, cheerful and graceful; Emily might have picked tulips at Mallowe Court.