Her father's diplomatic career entailed constant wanderings abroad, and wherever the multiplying family bestowed itself, it received unstinted praise and admiration as a model of domestic harmony, enlightenment and ideals.
The children owed everything to their mother, a sister of the first Lord Minto, who supervised their early education with all the energy and determination with which she guarded their health and morals. She confessed that "out of fourteen, I suckled thirteen. Eleven of the children had small-pox during their wanderings, also cow-pox, whooping-cough, measles and scarlet fever."
We know from Emily that before she was eleven, she had read Boswell's Johnson, the Memoirs of Cardinal Retz, and Shakespeare; and had committed to memory a great part of the Bible.
Small wonder that when Lady Auckland died in 1818, she had married off six of her daughters in a manner eminently satisfactory to a proud Whig lady, and from among them had provided William Pitt with the only love of his life in the person of Eleanor, Lady Buckinghamshire. At their mother's death, Emily and Fanny set up house with their eldest brother George and, on his appointment as Governor-General in 1835, accompanied him to India, where they remained until 1842.
George, Lord Auckland, died in 1849 and Fanny in the same year. For the remaining twenty years of her life, Emily Eden lived at Eden Lodge, Kensington Gore, passing her days in seeing her many friends, corresponding with them, writing her books and providing for her Whig circle a centre of political and literary interests which, despite her ill health, held together while she lived. She died at Richmond on August 5th, 1869, and is buried at Beckenham.
All her life Emily Eden moved in the select and exclusive Whig circle which had its headquarters at the beginning
