Anne Thackeray Ritchie , A Book of Sibyls: Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen

“ The bright and happy excitable girl comes up from Norwich to London to be made more happy still, and more satisfied with the delight of life as it unfolds. Besides her fancy for lawyers, literary people had a great attraction for Amelia, and Godwin seems to have played an important part in her earlier experience. A saying of Mrs. Inchbald's is quoted by her on her return home as to the report of the world being that Mr. Holcroft was in love with Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Inchbald with Mr. Godwin, Mr. Godwin with Miss Alderson, and Miss Alderson with Mr. ”

“ Charles Darwin, writing of these very people, has said, 'There is, perhaps, no safer test of a man's real character than that of his long-continued friendship with good and able men.' He then goes on to quote an instance of a long-continued affection and intimacy only broken by death between a certain set of distinguished friends, giving the names of Keir, Day, Small, Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood, and Darwin, and adding to them the names of Edgeworth himself and of the Galtons. ”

“ Long afterwards Jane Austen sent one of her novels to Miss Edgeworth, who appreciated it indeed, as such a mind as hers could not fail to do, but it was with no such enthusiasm as that which she felt for other more ambitious works, with more of incident, power, knowledge of the world, in the place of that one subtle quality of humour which for some persons outweighs almost every other. Something, some indefinite sentiment, tells people where they amalgamate and with whom they are intellectually akin ”

“ Barbauld's memory where more important people are forgotten.
Our authoress seems to have had a natural affection for sister authoresses. Hannah More and Mrs. Montague were both her friends, so were Madame d'Arblay and Mrs. Chapone in a different degree; she must have known Mrs. Opie; she loved Joanna Baillie. The latter is described by her as the young lady at Hampstead who came to Mr. Barbauld's meeting with as demure a face as if she had never written a line. And Miss Aikin, in her memoirs, describes in Johnsonian language how the two Miss Baillies came to call one morning upon Mrs. ”

“ Notwithstanding a certain reticence and self-control which seems to belong to their age, and with all their quaint dresses, and ceremonies, and manners, the ladies and gentlemen in 'Pride and Prejudice' and its companion novels seem like living people out of our own acquaintance transported bodily into a bygone age, represented in the half-dozen books that contain Jane Austen's works. Dear books! bright, sparkling with wit and animation, in which the homely heroines charm, the dull hours fly, and the very bores are enchanting. ”

“ Aikin brought his wife home to Knibworth, in Leicestershire, where he opened a school which became very successful in time. Mrs. Barbauld, their eldest child, was born here in 1743, and was christened Anna Lætitia, after some lady of high degree belonging to her mother's family. Two or three years later came a son. It was a quiet home, deep hidden in the secluded rural place; and the little household lived its own tranquil life far away from the storms and battles and great events that were stirring the world. Dr. Aikin kept school ”

“ The Edgeworths did not come as strangers to Paris; they brought letters and introductions with them, and bygone associations and friendships which had only now to be resumed. The well-known Abbé Morellet, their old acquaintance, 'answered for them,' says Miss Edgeworth, and besides all this Mr Edgeworth's name was well known in scientific circles. Bréguet, Montgolfier, and others all made him welcome. Lord Henry Petty, as Maria's friend Lord Lansdowne was then called, was in Paris, and Rogers the poet, and Kosciusko, cured of his wounds. ”

“ When the writer looks back upon her own childhood, it seems to her that she lived in company with a delightful host of little playmates, bright, busy, clever children, whose cheerful presence remains more vividly in her mind than that of many of the real little boys and girls who used to appear and disappear disconnectedly as children do in childhood, when friendship and companionship depend almost entirely upon the convenience of grown-up people. ”

“ Ruxton in rags as a beggar woman sitting on the doorstep, I should say "Madam" to her.' 'To write to her Aunt Ruxton was, as long as she lived, Maria's greatest pleasure while away from her,' says Mrs. Edgeworth, 'and to be with her was a happiness she enjoyed with never flagging and supreme delight. Blackcastle was within a few hours' drive of Edgeworthtown, and to go to Blackcastle was the holiday of her life.'
Mrs. ”

“ But she lives on only to be of use. 'Take care of indulging in little selfishnesses,' she writes in her diary; 'learn to consider others in trifles: the mind so disciplined will find it easier to fulfil the greater duties, and the character will not exhibit that trying inconsistency which one sees in great and often in pious persons.' Her health fails, but not her courage. She goes up to London for the last time to her cousin's house. She is interested in all the people she meets, in their wants and necessities, in the events of the time. ”

“ Many of them were the heroines of her various stories, and few heroines are more charming than some of Miss Edgeworth's. Rosamund is said by some to have been Maria herself, impulsive, warm-hearted, timid, and yet full of spirit and animation.
In his last letter to Mr. Edgeworth Dr. Darwin writes kindly of the authoress, and sends her a message. ”

“ Barbauld being studying a sermon, do I begin a letter to my dear Betsy.'
When she first married, and travelled into Norfolk to keep school at Palgrave, nothing could have seemed more tranquil, more contented, more matter-of-fact than her life as it appears from her letters. Dreams, and fancies, and gay illusions and excitements have made way for the somewhat disappointing realisation of Mr. Barbauld with his neatly turned and friendly postscripts—a husband, polite, devoted, it is true, but somewhat disappointing all the same. ”

“ How prone are our hearts perversely to quarrel with the friendly coercion of employment at the very instant in which it is clearing the torpid and injurious mists of unavailing melancholy!' Then follows a sprightly attack before which Johnson may have quailed indeed. 'Is the Fe-fa-fum of literature that snuffs afar the fame of his brother authors, and thirsts for its destruction, to be allowed to gallop unmolested over the fields of criticism? ”

“ Jervas ventures to ask some questions about the vessels, to which the waggoner answers 'They be nothing in life but the boats and ships, man;' so he turned away and went on chewing a straw, and seemed not a whit more moved to admiration than he had been at the sight of the thistle. 'I conceived a high admiration of a man who had seen so much that he could admire nothing,' says Jervas, with a touch of real humour. ”

“ Most of their old friends were there still; only the children had grown up and were now new friends to be greeted. It is a confusion of names in visionary succession, comprising English people no less than French. Miss Edgeworth notes it all with a sure hand and true pen; it is as one of the sketch-books of a great painter, where whole pictures are indicated in a few just lines. Here is a peep at the Abbaye aux Bois in 1820:—
We went to Madame Récamier in her convent, l'Abbaye aux Bois, up seventy-eight steps. ”

“ After Parents' Assistant, to which familiar words we attached no meaning whatever, came Popular Tales in big brown volumes off a shelf in the lumber-room of an apartment in an old house in Paris, and as we opened the books, lo! creation widened to our view. England, Ireland, America, Turkey, the mines of Golconda, the streets of Bagdad, thieves, travellers, governesses, natural philosophy, and fashionable life, were all laid under contribution, and brought interest and adventure to our humdrum nursery corner. ”

“ It is not often that women, when youth is long past, shed sudden and passionate tears of mere emotion, nor perhaps would a Quaker, trained from early childhood to calm moods and calm expressions, have been so suddenly overpoweringly affected; but Mrs. Opie was no born daughter of the community, she was excitable and impulsive to the last. I have heard a lady who knew her well describe her, late in life, laughing heartily and impetuously thrusting a somewhat starched-up Friend into a deep arm-chair exclaiming, 'I will hurl thee into the bottomless pit.'
X. ”

“ One can imagine 'Aunt Jane,' with her brother's children round her knee, telling her delightful stories or listening to theirs, with never-failing sympathy. One can fancy Cassandra, who does not like desultory novels, more prudent and more reserved, and somewhat less of a playfellow, looking down upon the group with elder sister's eyes. ”

“ Edgeworth was anxious also to show his young wife the treasures in the Louvre, and to help her to develop her taste for art. He had had many troubles of late, lost friends and children by death and by marriage. One can imagine that the change must have been welcome to them all. Besides Maria and Lovell, his eldest son, he took with him a lovely young daughter, Charlotte Edgeworth, the daughter of Elizabeth Sneyd. ”

“ Her appreciation of her own work and that of others is unaffected and really discriminating, whether it is 'Corinne' or a simple story which she is reading, or Scott's new novel the 'Pirate,' or one of her own manuscripts which she estimates justly and reasonably. 'I have read "Corinne" with my father, and I like it better than he does. In one word, I am dazzled by the genius, provoked by the absurdities, and in admiration of the taste and critical judgment of Italian literature displayed throughout the whole work: but I will not dilate upon it in a letter. ”