ABSTRACT
The manuscript of 'The Lady Penelope' is extant. It was presented by Hardy, through Sydney Cockerell, to the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in October 1911 when he was distributing his MSS. among various public collections. As R.L. Purdy notes, the MS. was foliated by Hardy, and is numbered 1-14; 'The Lady Penelope' and the six stories which appeared as A Group of Noble Dames in the Graphic are bound together in the order in which they appeared in the first collected edition of 1891.1
Sources
Hutchins's History of Dorset gives the following account of Lady Penelope Darcy, who married Sir George Trenchard as his second wife in the early years of the seventeenth century:
The second wife was heiress to the estate of her mother, Mary, countess of Rivers, daughter of Sir Thomas Kitson, of Hengrave, knt. Sir George dying
bart. by whom only she had issue; and being again left a widow, she then married William Hervey, of Ickworth, bart. She was courted by her three husbands at one time; but quarrels arising between them, she artfully put an end to them, by threatening the first aggressor with her perpetual displeasure; and humourously told them, that if they would be quiet and have patience she would have them all in their turns, which at last actually happened. (III, 329)
Lady Penelope is not identified by name at this point in Hutchins, so Hardy must have discovered it by consulting the Trenchard family pedigree (III, [326]). One modification which Hardy made to Hutchins is that his Lady Penelope has a child only by her third husband, and it is a stillborn one: she has a child, that is, only by the husband she loves best, and its death anticipates the tragic end of her final marriage. There is, of course, no hint in Hutchins of any malicious gossip about the death of her husbands.
