"…the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." – George Eliot, *Middlemarch* (1872)
FIELD NOTES – Dr. Eleanor Hartley LOCATION: The Garden of Remembered Names, Field of Letters; the Ward of the Blanched SUBJECT: The newly arrived; the fading When a woman's stone is laid and read aloud at the Gate, she arrives. She arrives at the age at which the world best remembers her, in the medium in which it kept her, with her memory whole, and she is given a cottage in the Garden of Remembered Names for her first season. The Garden is walled, honey-stone, unpretentious: cottages with two hearths each, built for company, and walls low enough to talk over. Every plant in it is named for a forgotten woman, and the beds are tended on the Rota like the stones; a rose nobody speaks to fades. The new arrivals are disorientated in the usual ways. They ask for the date. They ask who else is here. A good many of them ask to see their own stone, and stand in front of it for a long time. A weaver from Lyon whose stone I read in my first week arrived during my stay; she found me in the Gar...
From the lore of Cité des Dames.