LETTERS TO JANE FROM JAMAICA (1788-1796) Edited by Geraldine Mozley
Mrs. Mozley has made a pleasant little book of the letters that her great-great-grandmother; Mrs. Brodbelt, wrote from Jamaica to a daughter at school in England (West India Committee, 6s.). The father, a successful doctor in Spanish Town, came of an old Herefordshire family, to whose estates the son, also a doctor, was to succeed. Thus the Brodbelts moved in the best Jamaican society, and the mother's letters here and there touch on the gaieties of the colony as well as on the troubles caused by negro revolts and the French war. But in the main the correspondence is, as one would expect, of domestic rather than historic interest. Any mother would write such letters to any young daughter, and the occasional notes from the father, telling his Jane to mind her book, betray their antiquity only by their stilted phrases. Mrs. Mozley has edited her family papers with great care and reproduces an unusually good miniature of Jane, her sister and her brother by Cosway as a frontispiece.
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