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On the 4th of February 1848, after a very short illness, Mrs. Lestock Wilson—Fanny Edgeworth—died. Maria survived her little more than a year. She bore the shock without apparent injury to her health, and she continued to employ herself with her usual benevolent interest and sympathy in all the business and pleasures of her family and friends; but strongly as she was attached to all her brothers and sisters, Fanny had been the dearest object of her love and admiration. To her friend Mrs. S.C. Hall, who wrote to her as usual on 1st January (1849), which was her birthday, she answered, "You must not delay long in finding your way to Edgeworthstown if you mean to see me again. Remember, you have just congratulated me on my eighty-second birthday." In the spring she spent some weeks at Trim, where her sister Lucy and Dr. Robinson were with her. She seemed unusually agitated and depressed in taking leave of her sister Harriet and Mr. Butler, but said as she went away, "At Whitsuntide I shall return."
Only a few weeks before her death Miss Edgeworth wrote:
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Our pleasures in literature do not, I think, decline with age; last 1st of January was my eighty-second birthday, and I think that I had as much enjoyment from books as I ever had in my life.
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In her last letter to her sister, Honora Beaufort, she enclosed the lines:
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Ireland, with all thy faults, thy follies too,
I love thee still: still with a candid eye must view
Thy wit, too quick, still blundering into sense
Thy reckless humour: sad improvidence,
And even what sober judges follies call,
I, looking at the Heart, forget them all!
MARIA E. May 1849.