¹The letter concerns the publication of Hawker's story 'Kismet!' in MP (November 1892), which appeared with a note from the editor warning against marriage to an Italian. Hawker's biographer Evelyn March-Phillipps explains, 183-4, the context:

It is impossible to help smiling, as Marie must have done herself, over a passage with Miss Yonge. In spite of the opinion of the author of the Heir of Redclyffe that it was 'a pity that so fine a book as Cecilia de Noël should be injured by the entire absence of Christianity', Marie had been pressed to contribute a story to the Christmas number of the Monthly Packet, Miss Yonge's special organ. The story turns on the happy marriage of an English girl with an Italian nobleman, an innocent subject it would appear on the surface, but Miss Yonge, who did not always include a sense of humour among her other distinguished attributes, sets for the difficulties arising.

March-Phillipps goes on to quote part of a letter from Hawker to Christabel Coleridge:

If Miss Yonge would only carry out her views as to what ought to be the end of the story as explained in her letter to me . . it would make an entertaining paragraph. . . . I have never met anybody with so high-pitched a standard.