MS Westcountry Studies Library, Exeter/ Yonge 1860/14 1
My dear Miss Smith
Many thanks for the arrival of this morning and for your kind undertaking of the biographies. You will find a good deal more of Mrs Grant’s childhood in her Life of an American Lady, which may be got from Hookham’s library2 if from no where else. I wish I had the book or I would gladly lend it to you – it is a very interesting and curious picture, but in such stilted stiff language that it will be a great boon to have it made simple and easy. I should have set down Mrs Schuyler if she had not been nearly included in Mrs Grant. I had an impression that you would take Mrs Carter, you are so fond of that era. Have you the two goodly quartos of her letters. I am sure it might be a part of her history that her letters were put into quartos- but she is an engaging old lady, & I hope you will put in her brandy pudding, her wet walks, & the discussions with her father that only ended with the teapot! I shall be very glad if you will bethink you of any other interesting person whose life might make nice reading for the young, thus put into shape.
I have finished Mrs Fry, and very much I like it, but I am inclined to ask if it might not read a little better, if the bit about the supervision of families exercised by Quakers were put earlier instead of just where the memoir brought it before you. I think it might be as well to precede the whole with a short account of Quakerism and its requirements, for it would make her difficulties much more comprehensible. But that can be thought about at leisure. I am afraid, with all her heart humility, her exterior bearing was a little injured by feeling herself so prominent. I suppose it is hardly possible to help this, especially for a woman – (men do help it) – but I fear she did not but appeared outwardly to receive the homage paid as a right – at least so I have seen it stated in a review of a rather satirical book of an exquaker’s confessions, not a very trustworthy quarter perhaps. I am glad you liked Play & Earnest, I thought it a great advance on the first. The present story wants more action, but the mother seems to me a very original well conceived character
yours sincerely
C M Yonge