Author: Braddon, Mary Elizabeth.
Format: Autograph letter signed to “my dear Madge”, dated February 10th.
Printed letterhead “Imperial Hotel, Exmouth”, 2pp [over one folded sheet], 20.4 x 12.7cm.
Text includes “It has been on my conscience for a long time that I missed to write & thank you…We had a time of extreme anxiety just before Xmas – when Will’s baby…was dangerously ill with pneumonia. It was on his account – after he had made a wonderful recovery – that we came here January 6th. I have stayed ever since. The weather has been mixed but the climate is mild, & the place pretty, reminding us much of a quiet little station[?] on the Riviera. I sent no Xmas cards this year…mean never to send any again, for my nerves are not up to the task. I get flurried & addled about it. …All being well we should go back to Richmond in early March & when the weather is spring like. I hope you will let me have the pleasure of seeing you at Lichfield House. With kindest regards, Yours sincerely, Mary Maxwell.”
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), [later Maxwell after marrying publisher John Maxwell], was an English sensationalist novelist best known for Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), a novel which features “dangerous, scheming heroines embroiled in the complications of what negative reviewers termed the ‘Bigamy Plot.’ Along with Wilkie Collins and other sensation writers, they created a new genre in artistic response to the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, “while championing the rights of women against an obviously male-biased law that determined that, while a wife’s adultery alone was sufficient cause for a divorce action, a husband’s adultery was insufficient unless accompanied by physical abuse.” Ref: The Victorian Web; Wiki.
Old folds, minor soiling.
