Maria Grace Saffery, Salisbury, to Anne Whitaker, Bratton, [Friday], 15 August 1806.

My dearest Anna,

   You will expect yr weekly herald furnished with domestic intelligence; as usual tomorrow & I am very glad to equip him for your service without any mournful appendages – yr dear Joshua is quite well & except when he ought to say his lessons very happy – he has just been boasting of not being turn’d back this morng with a long lesson of geography so perhaps he is @ to mend – Carey appears better and there are no indications of chicken pox in any one else – I shall hope to hear of yr safe return home, & general welfare, by Sunday’s post – I have not recd any intelligence of Jane since you left  yr Cousin Eliz. Head call’d yesterday, just before she proceeded to Bodenham with her mother whom I did not see.  From Elizth I gain’d Miss Hopkins’s address but no decent particulars.  I wrote to Miss H–ns immediately.  I will not fatigue you with a detail of my present anxieties you are sufficiently aware of them and participate too largely.

   I hope Mary will not be troublesome  papa joins me in sending a kiss &c –  I should be greatly at a loss what to say next if it occur to me at this moment that I have some very good news indeed.  Mrs Long is much better.  This I am sure will rejoice you & make amends for the barbarous stupidity of my Epistle wh in fact ought to be accompanied with some sovreign antidote against ye spleen otherwise next to impossible it shd be read with tolerable humour but adieu ma chere amie, amidst “all ye dull realities of life” I think on you with a poignancy of sensation that enables me to subscribe myself,

                     Yr most tenderly devoted friend & Sister

                                 Maria Grace Saffery

Sarum  Aug. 15. 1806

Text: Timothy Whelan, gen. ed.,  Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 6, p. 217 (annotated version); Saffery/Whitaker Papers, acc. 142, I.B.1.(23.), Angus Library. Address: Mrs P. Whitaker | Bratton Farm | near Westbury Wilts.  No  postmark. Reference above is to Elizabeth Theodosia Head (1784-1825) and her mother, Marianna Attwater Head (1749?-1832), the latter a poet in her youth and close friend of Mary Steele. Miss Head never married, living her entire life with her mother at Bradford. Mary Steele composed a poem in her honour as a child (see Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 3, pp. 149-50).