MARIA JANE JEWSBURY By Eric Gillett
To be a poetess (as distinct from a poet), the friend of Mrs. Hemans and of Wordsworth, and ,the recipient of the original poem about the Stuffed Owl, would not seem the best qualifies- tions for a writer of light prose. Yet Maria Jane Jewslffiry wrote delightful prose. " Spirited " was the adjective they applied to it in her own day, and it has survived even thAt. In Maria Jane Jewsbury (Oxford, Os. ltd.) Mr. Gillett Has collected her occasional papers, with a memoir, and assured for an agreeable, talented, and almost entirely unremarkilye lady her little niche in the temple of Fame. The preponderAnce of good writers nowadays over good peopleto write about does at least ensure due fame for the Maria Jane Jewsburys of -Our literature. Mr. Gillett's memoir, unexceptionable as it is, hardly prepares us for the essays that follow. As he says of Jane and her more famous sister Geraldine : " There is nothing to account for this dual flowering of literary talent in the Jewsbury family." There is nothing to account for Jane's sense of humour. Her life was comfortable and stolid. Her father was a business man, and she lived in Manchester. She wrote, as has been said, poetry ; and she dedicated her Phantasmagoria, " with the sincere expression of her devoted admiration," to Wordsworth. She married a clergyman, being, not in love, but " in a very morally prudential frame of mind." The phrase is her Own; and typical. She, could mock herself, 'a§ '_well as others : and we can only regret that her talent was -so soon cut short. She went to India after her marriage, and died of cholera in 1833, when she was only thirty-two. Of the occasional papers, An Old Bachelor'S Trip to Paris is a fine piece of statistical, egotistical nonsense, and Going to be Married reads. almost like Jane, Apsten. Miss Jewsbury wrote verse, idie owned, principally to improve her prose. After this ingenuous admission, there ie no more to be said, except that we are glad she did write prose, and that Mr. Gillett has collected it.
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