In her time there were few women who gave even a moment’s thought to the possibilities of individual life as an artist, however aware they might be—must have been—of the gifts they possessed. I daresay that my great-grandmother was well satisfied enough with what life had brought her—“honour, love, obedience, troops of friends.” In one of her letters, written when she was a very old woman, she writes gaily of the hateful limitations of old age, and says:
“When people will live beyond their time such things must be, and I have a right to be thankful that old Time has put on his Slippers, and does not ride roughshod over me.”
(Which shows, I think, that marriage had subdued the artist in her, and had, in compensation, evoked the philosopher.)
It is clear, from the last letter in the preceding chapter, that Miss Edgeworth and Mrs. Bushe had not met before 1810. How soon afterwards they met, and the friendship, that lasted for the rest of their lives, began, I cannot ascertain. In one of Miss Edgeworth’s letters (quoted in one of the many volumes that have been written about her) she says:
“Having named Mrs. Bushe, I must mention that whenever I meet her she is my delight and admiration, from her wit, humour, and variety of conversation.”
Among the contents of the letter-box that Martin gave me are several letters from Miss Edgeworth, and they testify to the fact that she lost no time in falling in love with her “very dear Mrs. Bushe.”
I recognise, gratefully, how highly I am privileged in being permitted to include in my book these letters from the brilliant pioneer of Irish novelists. To the readers and lovers of, for example, “Castle Rackrent,” they may seem a trifle disappointing in their submission to the conventions of their period, a period that decreed a mincing and fettered mode for its lady letter-writers, and rigorously exacted from its females the suitable simper.
The writing is pale, prim, and pointed, undeniably suggestive of prunes, and prisms, and papa (that inveterate papa of Maria’s); yet, in spite of the fetters of convention, the light step is felt, and although the manner may mince, it cannot conceal the humour, the spirit, and the charm of disposition.
Miss Edgeworth was born in the same year as Chief Justice Bushe, and died six years later than he, in 1849. Her friendship with Mrs. Bushe remained unbroken to the last, and their mutual admiration continued unshaken. In such of Miss Edgeworth’s letters to my great-grandmother as I have seen, she speaks but little of literary work. One of the later letters, however (dated 1827), accompanied a present of one of her books; the date would make it appear that this was one of the sequels to “Early Lessons”—(in which the unfortunate Rosamond is victimised by the dastardly fraud of the Purple Jar, and Harry gets no breakfast until he has made his bed, although the fact that his sole ablutions consist in washing his hands is in no way imputed to him as sin. But this, also, is of the period).
Miss Maria Edgeworth to Mrs. Bushe.