SIR, — Loyalty to the vanished past prompts me to write to
you a few words about Mr. Hesketh Pearson's superficial book, The Pilgrim Daughters. Your reviewer, Katharine Whitehorn, considers that one of the occasions on which Mr. Pearson 'brings it off completely,' and reaches a Lytton Strachey standard, is when he says of the Jeromes 'the fourth need not detain. us.' This fourth sister, dismissed, probably because she only married a baronet, in this contemptuous and disparaging fashion, was Ldonie Leslie, the mother of Shane Leslie; the remark, unlike the brilliance of Lytton Strachey, is rude without being either funny or true. Being over eighty 1 knew the younger Jerome sisters well, long before their talented sons attained such conspicuous positions in the world. Jenny was much more beautiful than
Leonie, but let no one imagine that Leonie was a woman of no importance. She had a charming vivaci- ous personality, and cut a great figure in the social life of her time. She was a humorous and delightful companion, with a natural vitality and gaiety that made her widely popular both in London and in Ire- land. A writer so ignorant of the times of which he writes that he thinks Leonie Leslie need not detain us now she is dead fails to realise how she used to entertain us when she was alive.
ESHER
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