Reference
X955/1/148
Title
To Mrs Sarah Colenutt
Date free text
23rd Oct 1904
Production date
From: 1904 To: 1904
Scope and Content
The Cottage, Groombridge, Kent
My dear friend
I am grieved to hear about Charlie. You do not say if he has seen Dr. Pavy again. I much wish he would go, for I do not think that the best of physicians has a chance if he sees a patient only once. Molly and I are all
well, excepting a pain in my face which has sent me to the dentist three times lately. He has not yet finished.
The other children are also well. Willie goes in December for his annual holiday to Cornwall. Ernest’s wife has been staying with us. She is a good girl, I believe, and loves her husband, but why he married her I don’t quite know. She is not one of our set.
I, like you, have bought the new edition of Swinburne. There are some poems I wish he had omitted, but there are others which are unsurpassable. I cannot have enough of them – the Sea-mew and a Word with the wind. for example. I read them out aloud to myself so I that I may not miss their miraculous music.
I have also been reading Shirley and Jane Eyre again, once more to fall passionately in love with your old heroine, Caroline Helstone. Unluckily and improperly I am in love with Jane, but I hope in heaven bigamy will not be a crime. I stick to my conclusion that no man nor woman has ever half-way ascended the mountain on the summit of which Charlotte and Emily Bronte are enthroned. I am glad to find that at seventy-three my adoration of these two sisters is as profound as it was forty years ago.
Molly’s best love. Mine also
Your ever affectionate friend
W. Hale White
Level of description
item