"I must confess I have never been able to write comfortably when music
was going on. I think I have always written to most purpose coming in
fresh from a morning walk when the larks were singing and lambs
bleating and distant cocks in farmyards crowing, and a distant dog
barking to an echo which answered his voice, and when the hedges and
banks were full of wild flowers with quaint and pretty names.
"Next to that, I have found the best time soon after early tea, when my
companions were all in the garden, and likely to remain there till
moonlight."
Not very much by way of a literary portrait, and yet one can fill it in
for oneself, can place her in old-world Reigate, fast, alas! becoming
over-built and over-populated like all the rest of the country over
which falls the ever-lengthening London shadow. As one ponders upon
Forest Hill for Mary Powell's sake--is not Shotover as dear a name as
Shottery?--and Chalfont for Milton's sake, one thinks on Reigate
surrounded by its hills for Anne Manning's sake, and keeps the place in
one's heart.
_Mary Powell_, with its sequel, _Deborah's Diary_--Deborah was the
young thing whom to bring into the world Mary Powell died--is one of
the most fragrant books in English literature. One thinks of it side
by side with John Evelyn's _Mrs. Godolphin_. Miss Manning had a
beautiful style--a style given to her to reconstruct an idyll of
old-world sweetness. Limpid as flowing water, with a thought of
syllabubs and new-made hay in it, it is a perpetual delight. This
mid-Victorian, dark-haired lady, with the aquiline nose and high
colour, although she may not have looked it, possessed a charming
style, in which tenderness, seriousness, gaiety, humour, poetry, appear
in the happiest atmosphere of sweetness and light.