Maria and the Bellasis Family 10

Chapter 10

The election is over, and Mr. Gladstone has won. Florence will be pleased. But my poor brother Edgar who was standing for election in Exeter had to withdraw because of his health.  He and his family have had a bad time of it lately. They all had typhoid fever not long ago, and he was very slow to recover from it. In the end his doctor decided he was not fit to continue campaigning. He is very weak and not surprisingly depressed. 

Things are going well for Lewin however.  He and Kattie  had another son, Ignatius.   Lewin  has been elected County Magistrate in Torquay. News articles about him are always full of the work he did in India.  They give him credit for almost raising the Prince of Mysore, as he was the administrator for the young Raja.  They call him a great influence in civilizing India  with his wisdom and devotion to work.  I enjoy my visits to Lewin and his family, and always share my stories with Mother Francis, as she is also their childrens’ aunt.  I spent a month or so with them in January this year and hope to go again later in the year. Kattie was still well enough in her pregnancy to go to a dance with me, and that was written up in the papers too.

I had a letter from Florence telling me about the wedding of her friend, Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name, George Elliot, with John Cross, who is twenty years her junior.  The great love of her life, Mr. George Lewis died two years ago, and they never married but lived together to a certain amount of condemnation, for many long years  She suggested that I see if I can find a copy of Middlemarch, thought to be her best novel, (and in some people’s mind the best novel ever written) and read it, if I have not done already, and we can discuss it when I next come to visit her.   

We don’t have much in the way of reading material here at the convent, other than lives of the Saints  and writings by great Catholic leaders such as Cardinal Newman.  But I have sufficient means to buy what I need, so I went to the big London bookshop in Piccadilly, Hatchards,  and bought all of George Elliot's novels and all of those by Elizabeth Gaskell, who Florence was also friendly with.  Florence seems to think that her work in Turkey influenced George Ellliot’s and Elizabeth Gaskell’s writing. They got to know each other as the Literary Geniuses of the time all seemed to do. I think Charles Dickens had a lot to do with that. He was happy to serialize the work of great writers in his magazine,  Household Words and then later in All the Year Around, as he did with all his own work, and people were able to cope with a chapter at a time and got engaged in the writing, and followed the stories through to the end.  The magazine costs even now only 2d a week, or 9d if you buy a month’s worth in a very nice cover.  Elizabeth Gaskell, and of courses, her husband William and she were very involved in the Unitarian movements, so my family knew them too. Elizabeth went to Florence’s parents house when she was writing her novel, North and South. She was very friendly with Florence’s sister Parthy, her pet name, as her full name is a bit of a mouthful, Parthorpe.

She was named after the Greek name for the Italian city, Paleapolis, which was named for the siren Parthenthorpe. Later it was called Neopolis and that was again shortened to Naples. . Florence of course was born in Florencein Italy, hence the name she was given. 

I looked up sirens just to be sure that I knew what the original name suggested. Sirens were winged women who were said to lure sailors off course and onto the rocks. 

While I was in Hatchards, I also picked up the latest months’ of All the Year Round, and find it has the serialized story The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollop. I’ll be able to quiz Florence to see if she is up to date with her reading too.  I hope to go to see her in the spring. She says she is feeling a lot better now, and plans to spend Easter with her sister and brother in law, Lord and Lady Varney at their home in Cornwall. Apparently, I have been told that Lord Varney was a suitor for Florence originally but when she refused him, she also introduced him to her sister who he married.