Diaries (three volumes).
LONG (Lady Catherine), née Walpole, 1797-1867, religious novelist. Her manuscript diaries. Two volumes. Original limp morocco. Small 4to. 261 pages, approximately 55,000 words. January 1861-15 August 1867.
Lady Catherine Long was the youngest child of Horatio Walpole, second earl of Orford (1757-1822). In July 1822 she married Henry Lawes Long of Surrey and had eight children. Her writing included two novels, "Sir Roland Ashton: a Tale of the Times" (1824), a story directed against Tractarianism which had some success, and "The First Lieutenant's Story" (1853). She edited, and contributed to, a collection of inspirational verse, "The Midsummer Souvenir" (1846), which contained work by Felicia Hemans and Sarah Stickney Ellis among other popular writers.
Her diaries are essentially a basic record of her doings, which were mainly domestic in nature, at her home, Hampton Lodge, the Long estate on the south side of the Hog's Back, near Seale, Surrey. She took a keen interest in the weather and had, it seems, a garden to which she was much devoted. Numerous references are made to the comings and goings of her children and of her wider family, notably her many Walpole relations, with occasional references to the anxiety she felt about some of them. Her intense social life involves dinners and visits to the local gentry and nobility. There is only the occasional reference to her work with a mention of a visit to Blackwoods and, on 4 March 1863, a note that "Murray had got the MSS" and, "...went to Murray and talked long with him." Some national events are mentioned, including a visit in 1862 to the International Exhibition, which opened in the same month as "the poor Queen's first desolate birthday" (previously Lady Catherine had composed an elegy set to music on the death of Prince Albert). In 1866 she witnesses Gladstone and Disraeli in Parliament and laments "the dreadful war between Prussia & Italy against Austria." In July 1863 there is an intriguing reference to a sale of the effects of "H.W.", perhaps a Walpole relation, "where I got most of the things I wanted." The last entry, typically with a reference to the weather, is on 15 July 1867, just over a month before her death on 20 August 1867. Loosely inserted is a poem in Lady Catherine Long's autograph, titled "Receipt for mimicking Lady Granville", not a rare lapse into some fun at the expense of the society hostess who spoke in the "bleating drawl" of the Devonshire House set, but a guide to emulation of the very best of womankind.
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