" The beginning, too, as she acknowledges, was on a scale
commensurate with one of Richardson's novels, of seven or eight volumes.
I gather some of these particulars from a copy of a letter, apparently in
reply to one from Wordsworth, to whom she had sent the commencement of
the story, sometime in the summer of 1840.
"Authors are generally very tenacious of their productions, but I am
not so much attached to this but that I can give it up without much
distress. No doubt, if I had gone on, I should have made quite a
Richardsonian concern of it . . . I had materials in my head for half-
a-dozen volumes . . . Of course, it is with considerable regret I
relinquish any scheme so charming as the one I have sketched. It is
very edifying and profitable to create a world out of your own brains,
and people it with inhabitants, who are so many Melchisedecs, and have
no father nor mother but your own imagination . . . I am sorry I did
not exist fifty or sixty years ago, when the 'Ladies' Magazine' was
flourishing like a green bay-tree. In that case, I make no doubt, my
aspirations after literary fame would have met with due encouragement,
and I should have had the pleasure of introducing Messrs. Percy and
West into the very best society, and recording all their sayings and
doings in double-columned close-printed pages .
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