Mary Steele [Dunscombe], [Broughton,] to her half-sister, Martha Steele, Abingdon, [Monday] 30 January 1797.

   Perhaps these Pages may recall to the Memory of my Belov’d Sister the hours when Life was new, when the pleasure they imparted to her was reverborated to me with redoubled delight as a presage of that sympathy of mind which has sweeten’d many a succeeding hour. May none of the changing Scenes of Life ever efface those endear’d remembrances – nor blot from her heart an absent but Affectionate sister

                                             M D

Janry 30 1797

Text: Timothy Whelan, ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 3, p. 343 (annotated version); STE 5/12/vii, Steele Collection, Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford.No address page. This note was written just after Steele’s marriage to Thomas Dunscombe. The reference to ‘Pages’ may refer to a bound volume (now STE 5/4), inscribed ‘M. Steele’s Common Place Book 1797’, containing a collection of poems and prose in several hands (mostly Martha Steele and Mary Steele Tomkins). Some of the poems are by Mary Steele; it may be that she gave Martha the bound volume along with manuscripts of some of her poems to be copied into her commonplace book, but that cannot be known for certain. The volume was passed on to Selina Bompas through her mother, Mary Steele Tomkins.