Читать книгу The Journal to Eliza and Various letters by Laurence Sterne and Elizabeth Draper онлайн

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One aspect of the self-drawn portrait has especial interest. Mrs. Draper was—I have said it—a blue-stocking. She was probably not acquainted with Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, whose assemblies of blue-stockings were then famous; but the Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear had reached India. After reading Mrs. Montagu’s book, Mrs. Draper declared that she “would rather be an Attendant on her Person, than the first Peeress of the Realm.” And so under this new inspiration Mrs. Draper resumed the scribbling to which she had been encouraged by Sterne. “A little piece or two” that she “discarded some years ago,” were completed; they were “not perhaps unworthy of the press,” but they were never printed. Though these efforts seem to be lost, Mrs. Draper took advantage of the occasion to weave into her letter to Mrs. James various little essays which may be described in her phrase as “of the moral kind,” because they have to do with practical conduct. Anxiety for the welfare of her daughter Betsey, who had been put to school at Kensington, leads to several pages on the boarding-school and the parlor-boarder, which are good enough to find a place in one of Mrs. Chapone’s letters. A little way on, she relates the “story of a married pair, which,” she says, “pleased me greatly, from the sensible singularity of it.” The tale tells of a wealthy and indolent man in North India who married a smart young woman to “rouse his mind from its usual state of Inactivity”—and he succeeded. The wife, too, discarded her light airs, and became a most agreeable woman. It all reads like a character sketch from Margaret Duchess of Newcastle. There is also an experiment in the sentimental style, wherein is told the story of “a smart pretty French woman,” who, shutting out all promiscuous loves and friendships, kept her heart for her dear husband alone and one “sweet woman” across the Alps. “The lovely Janatone,” writes Mrs. Draper, “died three Years ago—after surviving her Husband about a Week and her Friend a twelvemonth.” And besides these, there are other sketches from life, and vivid descriptions of society at Bombay. If Eliza did not write exactly, as Sterne flattered her, “with an angel’s pen,” she knew how to ramble agreably.