Anne Steele, Trowbridge, to Anne Cator Steele, Broughton, 26 September 1729.

Hond Mother,

         I rec.d your acceptable Letter (as glad to hear from you) but am sorry to hear of my Brothers illness, & Aunts death and doubt not but my cousins are in a great deal of trouble for the death of their Mother but I hope the same God that (no doubt) for wise ends took her from them will enable them to bear their affliction with patience, as to my likeing the place I suppose you know my mistress is an odd temper’d Woman but she is as kind to me as to ye rest, our work is most on headcloaths, and I hope I shall Learn very well.  I think your acquaintance here are all well at present, I also am thro mercy in good health  Cousin Betty is sent for home which makes me a little dull to be without her  I long to see you all & hope I shall see my Father in a little time  Cousin Cottle’s and Mrs Hurn give their service to you this with my duty to my Father and to your self, and love to sister Molly, is from your dutyfull and obedient Daughter:

                                             Anne Steele

PS  I desire you would excuse my bad writing being by candle because we work till its dark now.

Trowbridge Septr 26th 1729

Text: Timothy Whelan, gen. ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 2 (ed. Julia B. Griffin), p. 257 (edited version); STE 3/7/vi, Steele Collection, Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford. No address page.

Elizabeth Gay (1715-44) of Haycombe, Anne’s cousin and sister to Anna Gay Attwater (1710-84), mother of Jane and Marianna Attwater. Elizabeth Gay also attended Mrs. Hurn’s boarding school with Anne Steele. Elizabeth’s father, John Gay (1666-1729), died the same year as the above letter, and her eldest brother, Richard, died in 1736. Her mother, Jane Cator Gay (1680-1756), was Anne Cator Steele’s sister. Elizabeth married Thomas Phipps, Esq., of Westbury Leigh, near Bratton, in 1743 and died the following year. Another sister, Jane (Jenny) (d. 1763), married Philip James Gibbs of Trowbridge c. 1750. Reeves discusses a set of 15 letters, dated between 1735 and 1742, that passed between Eliza Gay of Haycombe and her sister, Anna Attwater at Britford and later (after 1742) at Bodenham. See Marjorie Reeves, Pursuing the Muses: Female Education and Nonconformist Culture 1700-1900 (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), pp. 10-15; Broome, A Bruised Reed, pp. 70-71, 123.

Trowbridge was also home to a number of relations of the Cators, including the Cottles, who, like the Cators and the Steeles, were staunch Particular Baptists. Anne Steele maintained a close relationship with her cousin, Grace Cottle, wife of Joseph Cottle. Upon his death, Grace removed to Bristol, where she lived with her son, Robert Cottle, whose son, Joseph (1770-1853) would become a Bristol bookseller, making a name for himself in the 1790s as publisher of the early poems of Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and some lesser Romantic figures. References to Grace Cottle appear in two letters of AS to her stepmother, this one and the next; also in William Steele’s letter to Joseph Cottle at Trowbridge, 28 June 1736. Joseph Cottle the bookseller placed a letter by AS to his grandmother, dated 18 May 1761 (letter 48 below), into his album of autograph letters (known as Cottle’s Bristol Album, now in the possession of Cornell University).