Maria Grace Saffery, Salisbury, to Anne Whitaker, Bratton, [Saturday, 31 August 1816].

Dearest Anne,

   I have talked to you many hours since I failed to write; and soothed myself with the expressions of your sympathy to which I semed listening whenever my heart made its imaginary appeals but the present effort at communication is far from being of this sweet and involunatary kind. I rather shrink from what appears to me a deliberate attack upon your repose & feel as if I would rather fancy than ensure your participation –  It is time however to assure you with my own hand of my recovered health and the welfare of the dear little ones who freed as they now are from the languishment of disease are happily as free from other sympathies, which would otherwise stil make them my companions in the tribulation. Pity indeed would it be if such tender beings were liable to the contagion of a sorrow, which I could so feebly instruct them to endure – but this must not be a detail of feeling – be satisfied for the present my beloved friends with the certainty of my corporeal welfare, and with ye promise that I will reject no means that may be deemed of efficacy to restore the “fainting energies of my Soul.” I thought too when I sat down to write, that I would trust myself with some mention of past suffering, or rather perhaps with some acknowledgment of ye immediate pang. But I seem alike destitute of intellectual and moral strength. For I am now what you have ever known me after distress, so incapable of speaking or writing much on the immediate subject that the stupor of the head seems only equaled by the tumult of the heart.

   I have had some very interesting letters but as yet I cannot answer them one from Mrs Bullar one from our Cousin Harriet. The latter wants to hear of Anne  say to her in a line for me that I am getting well, that I will write when I can.  I must close now, in my next I hope to tell you better things some sense of wh is I trust the best the selected portion of

                 Yrs most tenderly & faithfully

                                 Marie Grace Saffery

my beloved S wd be affectely remembered he is not quite well –

Text: Timothy Whelan, gen. ed.,  Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 6, p. 354 (annotated version); Saffery/Whitaker Papers, acc. 142, I.B.4.c.(15.), Angus Library. Address: Mrs Philip Whitaker | Bratton Farm | Obliged by Mr Larkham.  No postmark.  The Mrs. Bullar mentioned above was the wife of John Bullar of Southampton, a dissenting schoolmaster; his 27 letters to Maria Saffery can befound in the Saffery/Attwater Papers, acc. 142, II.D.4. ‘Cousin Harriet’ is Harriet Andrews of Shaw.