A Scandal Prone Etiquette Authority?

The British socialite and philanthropist was a renowned beauty of the Victorian Era and was one of the most scandalous women in the highest of Edwardian England’s social circles.

–  Public domain image of Frances “Daisy” Evelyn Greville, Countess of Warwick

 An Authority Speaks – Is An Etiquette Expert!

Frances Evelyn, Countess of Warwick, Writes For Papers

One of England's Most Popular Hostesses Will Give a Series of Articles on the Charm and Dignity of Good Manners In Social Life

It is announced that Frances Evelyn, Countess of Warwick, will write a series of articles on etiquette for newspapers. In her introduction the countess states:"If parents were more with their children familiarity with all the details of etiquette would be inherited rather than acquired.

While mothers are content to leave their little ones to others, boys will tend to become rough and self conscious and girls will regard instructions as a lesson and resent it accordingly. I have made it a rule to have my children around me on every possible occasion.

"The tendency toward carelessness must be repressed by all of us, and etiquette has done much to add to the charm and dignity of life. We need more study of demeanor than do the French, Italians and Spaniards, for the Latin races have a natural grace that is only seldom found among us. The Italian peasant of the Maremma, the Spanish shepherd of the Asturias, will astonish you by his perfect courtesy, his instinctive knowledge of the right word, the appropriate action.

"We are rougher and more rude until we have been polished on the grindstone of polite custom or until we have traveled and lost our insularity.

"After all, our behavior is the reflection of our personality, and while, if that personality be gracious, knowledge of etiquette will set it off to complete advantage, an aggressive personality cannot be made tolerable by amount of perfectly correct action.

"Yet knowledge is power. I think it was Francis Bacon who said that the man who goes to a foreign country without a knowledge of its language, goes to school and not to travel, and in the same way the men or women who seek the pleasures of social life, without knowing either how to entertain or to be entertained, miss the fundamental pleasures of intercourse." —Oceanside Register, May 1916

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