of the nineteenth century at Holland House, Bowood and a dozen other great country houses, and passed the Reform Bill from Brooks' Club, transferring with wonderful illogicality a share of their exclusive privileges to the middle classes, which above all others it was their habit and recreation to ridicule and despise.
She possessed all the prejudices of her class, the convinced belief that the few great families to whom she was drawn or related were a race apart, and that every other family and class in the State belonged to a lower order of the animal creation. She accompanied her brother to India because she possessed a fine sense of duty and because she loved him, but she regarded the task imposed on her precisely as a banishment for a period of years to a colony of gibbering apes, and at first she rarely left the grounds of the Viceregal residences, or showed even the most genteel curiosity about the wonders around her and the lives of those who administered that portion of the Empire. Her heart remained in the West End of London, and in the drawing-rooms at Bowood—a cosmos quite large enough for a Whig lady of fashion of that day.
Subsequently the glamour of the East conquered her, and her two books on India, Portraits of the People (1844) and Up the Country (1866) were widely read.
Miss Eden was no Miss Gabblegoose. She was a keen politician, clever, witty, shrewd, critical, well-informed, the friend of the great men of the day, such as Melbourne, and Monkton Milnes who greatly admired her novels. Her letters[1] have been published, and reveal those qualities of shrewd observation and wit which are especially brought out in correspondence with her friend, Lady Campbell, daughter of Lord Edward Fitzgerald.
As a novelist. Miss Eden set little store by her work, and must have suffered from the fact that, at the time she began
- ↑ Edited by her great-niece, Miss Violet Dickinson.
