Sources (Character profile of Lady Villiers)

In reconstructing a character profile of Lady Villiers, I have relied chiefly on a book of reminiscences, Memoires de la Cour d'Angleterre (1694), by Marie Catherine le Jumelle de Berneville, the Baroness D'Aulnoy (or Dunois), a frequent guest at the Restoration Court. The Memoires was so sensational that it served as a model for the famous Memoires (1701) of Philibert Comte de Gramont; it also initiated a vogue in chroniques scandaleuses, which culminated (in England) in the popular novels of Delarivier[e] Manley in the early eighteenth century. It was not until 1913, however, that D'Aulnoy's Memoires received a fully annotated and apparently reliable English-language edition by Lucretia Arthur (Mrs. William Henry Arthur). So detailed are D'Aulnoy's memoirs and so generous the editorial annotations by Arthur that sections of the volume serve as a clef to Ephelia's Female Poems.

I also found useful information in biographies of the Stuarts, the Villierses, and of members of their interrelated circles, such as Prince Rupert. (These sources are listed in Works Cited)

For contemporay work on butterflies, I delved into the pre-Linnaean classic which A.S. Byatt's gothic novella, Morpho eugenia (film adaptaion, Angels & Insects, 1995) may bring back into currency: Dr. Thomas Muffet's handsomely illustrated folio of 326 pages, the Theatrum Insectorum (1634; Eng. tr., 1658). His anachnophobic daughter, Patience Muffet, is the "Little Miss Muffet" in the famous English childhood rhyme, which mentions insects. In contemporary materials, variants of "Muffet" are "Mouffet" and "Moufet."

Pleasureful searches in the summer of 1995 at The American Museum of Natural History in New York City into other relevant entomological classics, by Maria Sibylla Merian, Jan Swammerdam, and Ulysses Androvandi, though pleasureful, were not fruitful.