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DEDICATORY LETTER

Dear Elizabeth

You told me once that you were bored with sequels, both in real life and in novels–this, if I remember correctly, was when I begged you to give us some more of Fraulein Schmidt’s history.

It would therefore be extremely impertinent of me to offer you a sequel–and this, in real life at least, I have hitherto succeeded in avoiding.

Now also I take no risk. This story of Janet Grandison, her marriage and her sister, is no sequel to anything save that it is, of course, like all of us, a sequel to everything. What I really mean is that you need read no other book before it in order properly to understand it.

But once upon a time, when I was young and credulous, I planned a Trilogy, called it “The Rising City” and published the first volume of it, “The Duchess of Wrexe.”

So many people, older and wiser than I, told me that I was a fool to meddle with Trilogies, that I fancied myself Balzac, that readers hated presumption, and that novelists must be modest or they are nothing.

Therefore I pretended to kill my Trilogy, hid my Rising City under a green mist, and went my way. Trilogies, however, cannot be killed like that; they are the most persistent things alive. The Trilogy has grown into an unending sequence. After “The Duchess of Wrexe” came “The Green Mirror” and after “The Green Mirror” “The Young Enchanted,” and now after “The Young Enchanted” this “Wintersmoon,” and after “Wintersmoon”–who knows?

Here, at any rate, in these four books, is my idea of some of the England of 1900 to 1927, and behind this there is also something else that holds them, in my fancy, together.

And there are my four heroines, Rachel Seddon, Katherine and Millie Trenchard and Janet Grandison. But, because an author sees a connection in these things and has the conceit to look on his four books as one continuous work no compulsion is offered to the reader. “Wintersmoon,” indeed, may be read as though it had no ancestors and intends no progeny.

Above all, no compulsion is offered to yourself, dear Elizabeth, who rightly resents anything of the sort, anything that sounds too long to be borne.

So, if you will read this book simply as a story about certain people who appear for an hour or two to be alive in their own world you will have done everything that your faithful friend, the author, asks of you.

Yours affectionately,

HUGH WALPOLE.