Autograph Letter Signed (with elaborate monogram initials, AJVN). 7x4½". 4pp. including stampless address leaf.
To “my dear friend”, Miss [Mary Russell] Mitford, Three Mile Cross near Reading. The daughter of a New York clergyman and author who became a brilliant Loyalist spymaster for the British during the Revolutionary War, Anna Jane Vardill (1781-1852) published two books of poetry and a Gothic novel before her marriage to Scotsman James Niven. After his death in the 1830s, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning she became close friends with prolific British novelist and dramatist Mary Russell Mitford. The 750+ words of this letter was written during Niven’s visit, with her daughter Agnes, to London, some 50 miles from Mitford’s home in southeast England, where the unmarried author cared for her aged father. Niven’s prose is exquisite, remnant of a long-lost art of literary letter-writing of the Austen and Browning era. Quoting in brief: “…the cold brought back a most unwelcome deafness first caused by sitting in a newly washed room without fire during an intense winter…our temporary Yorkshire home…with the same green lane overhung by trees and rich “abrupt descent” of ample meadow, bordered thickly with ancient trees. The master was your old bluff jovial farmer with black straight hair and merry eyes, adding to his rank of church warden and overseer, the government of an ancient and wealthy mill…Add Tom Cordery’s city of refuge for wild and tame animals, built by his half wild and half tame children behind the house…And the enlivening novelty of such a group, often assembled in the parlor, must have been sufficient to awake the dullest child; therefore I relied on its affect in breaking the gossamer veil which wraps our Agnes among strangers. Herself the greatest pet of the four girls educated at home, even when their dormouse, hare, pony, pigeons, hyacinths and geraniums were present, she showed among them all the graciousness of secure power. Here, among ten or twenty brilliant girls, the shy little recluse is of no consequence; and the charm, the power and the felicity of a social temper will be taught by her own feelings of her present insignificance…Our Cinderella’s patroness tells her she cannot supply, though she may alter substances; therefore, no chariot could be procured till Cinderella dug a pumpkin from her own garden and no horses till she remembered two mice she had saved from death. The blackbird she had sheltered in her garret was easily transformed into a velvet-coated charioteer and her clean though patched garments into silver tissue; but whence could barefooted Cinderella find hose and shoes for metamorphose?...We will try to imitate Cinderella and be content if our equipage vanishes, provided the domestic pets, the garden and the well of kindness remain…While this buzz continues in my ear, no rhymes can jingle musically. But Agnes has copied C. Vernet’s fine horses whose head certainly suits your sketch of ‘Copenhagen’, the Belisarius of Strathfieldsay. Our only Indian dove, tired of widowhood, took flight last week and his place is occupied by a linnet seven times redeemed from Puss who caught him in the garden. According to the moral laws of Hindoo metempsychoses , he must be a Grimalkin condemned to suffer the deaths he inflicted on too trusting birds…” A great rarity; no letter of Niven’s has appeared at auction in the last 30 years.