Edwardians in love

WHAT WOULD THE small group of people known as the Edwardians have thought if they could have read today's attempts to reconstruct the complicated game of their love life! They might be indignant at revelations and yet unable to resist contradicting errors. I must be among the few to whom a delicious grandmother—American and therefore slightly an outsider—recounted the intricate rules of the Prince of Wales's set before 1900. The First World War swept away need for decorum and the Second ended strict chaperonage of girls and the stigma of divorce. Now the Pill has completely destroyed audaciousness in illegal love-making. The mystery and the danger are gone, pent-up emotions freed. Hemlines may rise and fall but moral restraint has been thrown to the four winds. How difficult it is for this classless generation to visualize a world where so many automatic restrictions were in force; where a well-brought-up girl was never allowed to be alone a man even for half an hour in the drawing-room; and where all women expected all men to make up to them the instant they found themselves alone. That was the convention of the time. All males were in search of prey. All females must be protected from what was called then, but not now, deflowering. The amorous adventures described in this book occurred over a period of about fifty years—from 1860 when Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, stepped into the social scene as a handsome young rip until his death in 1910 as the portly Edward V Il.