Records of Later Life

by Fanny Kemble

Bannisters, Tuesday, 13th, 1846.

You say, my dear Hal, that you see Emily and me perpetually, in various positions, holding various conversations. Had you a vision of us this morning, by the comfortable fire in my room, I reading, and she listening to, your letter?...

Thank you, my dear friend, for your flagellatory recipe, which I beg to decline. The sponging with vinegar and water I do practise every morning, and as I persevere in it until my fingers can hardly hold the sponge for cold, and my throat is as crimson as if it were flayed, I hope it will answer the same purpose as lashing myself, which I object to, partly, I suppose, for Sancho Panza's reasons, and partly because of its great resemblance to, not to say identity with, the superstitious practices of the idolatrous and benighted Roman Catholic Church.

The amount of medical advice and assistance which I have received since I have been restored to the affectionate society of my dear Emily and her kind mother is hardly to be told....

I shall not answer your letter seriously: I am convinced it is bad for you. I believe Dorothy never laughs (you know the Devil in "Faust" says the Almighty never does), and I am satisfied that what you are languishing for is a little absurdity, which she cannot by any possibility afford you.

How I wish I was with you! because, though I am no more absurd than that sublime woman Dorothy, I at least know how to take the best advantage, both for you and myself, of the great gifts you possess in that line; and the mutual sweetness and utility of our intercourse is, I am persuaded, principally owing to the judicious use I make of the extraordinary amount of absurdity it has pleased Heaven to vouchsafe you, my most precious friend.

And so you think I shall have plenty of "admiring friends" for my "gay hours" (!!!!), but shall be glad to fall back, in my less delightful ones, upon the devoted affection of—you? (Oh, Harriet, oughtn't you to be ashamed of yourself?)

I have more friends, I humbly and devoutly thank God for them, than almost any one I know; those I depend upon I can count upon the fingers of one hand, and you are the thumb.

In the useless struggle you persist in making to be reasonable (why don't you give it up? I've known you hopelessly at it now forty years or thereabouts), you really make use of very singular and, permit me to say, inappropriate language. After detailing, in a manner that nearly made me cry and laugh with distress for you and disapprobation of you, all your unnecessary agonies of anxiety about me, you suddenly rein yourself up with an extra-reasonable jerk, and say that "the foolish importance you attach to trifles is as great as ever."

Now, my dearest friend, for such you undoubtedly are, allow me to observe that this mode of speaking of me does not appear to me either reasonable or appropriate. From what point of view I can appear a trifle to the most partial and rational of my friends, I am at a loss to conjecture. The parallel seems to me to halt on all its feet. A white, light, sweet, and agreeable article of human consumption bears, I apprehend, extremely small affinity to a dark, heavy, tart, and uneatable female. However, if you find that this, to me, singularly distorted mode of viewing facts assists your hitherto unsuccessful efforts at mental and moral equipoise, I am perfectly willing to be a trifle in your estimation, or indeed anywhere but on your table.