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To Mary Yonge
Elderfield
March 17th [1895]

MS West Devon Area Record Office Ac 1092/20

My dear Mary
One knew only too well what it must come to, and that the wounds one knew so well were being opened. Poor Charlotte, one cannot help thinking of her above all though the heaviest loss is to the poor little Cordelia, next to her father, but a mother to a girl so young is an inexpressible loss.1

‘The clouds return after the rain’2 After all those for whom one grieves the most, are those who have had the least sorrow and pain-

I have been all the morning at the school inspection and this is a sort of hurry – Oh! it is a great grief the brothers and sisters all looked up so to Katharine and I don’t think that the thread had been broken by her marriage. I suppose that influenza always does attack the most tender parts, but I had a shadow of hope that there might be some fresh form of treatment since former sorrows.

your most loving
C M Yonge

1Katharine (Yonge) Steer (1863/4-1895), eldest child of Duke and Charlotte Yonge, died on 16 March 1895. She had married Dr Adam Steer, a surgeon, in 1886, and had a heart murmur after getting yellow fever in Jamaica; she had died of influenza; after her death the insurance company refused to pay out her life policy, claiming non-disclosure, see The Times (25 July 1896).
2Ecclesiastes 12: 1-2 'Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain'.

Cite this letter


The Letters of Charlotte Mary Yonge(1823-1901) edited by Charlotte Mitchell, Ellen Jordan and Helen Schinske.

URL to this Letter is: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/yonge/3287/to-mary-yonge-15

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