Regarding Fanny Fern and her daughters, Ellen and Grace Eldredge. Transcription: no more real regard than springs from the attrition of intimacy. Nelly [Eldredge] will be in her mother [Fanny Fern]'s counterpart in the worser traits. Grace [Eldredge] is less tainted ? less affected by the heathenish way in which the girls have been brought up. What a world of protest is there in her 'Oh, mother! ' sometimes when Fanny is peculiarly Fernish. She doesn ?t scruple to tell slap-dash lies before her daughters, being ready to turn on the instant with a thousand expedients if they don't pass cur
Regarding Fanny Fern and her daughters, Ellen and Grace Eldredge. Transcription: no more real regard than springs from the attrition of intimacy. Nelly [Eldredge] will be in her mother [Fanny Fern]'s counterpart in the worser traits. Grace [Eldredge] is less tainted ? less affected by the heathenish way in which the girls have been brought up. What a world of protest is there in her 'Oh, mother! ' sometimes when Fanny is peculiarly Fernish. She doesn ?t scruple to tell slap-dash lies before her daughters, being ready to turn on the instant with a thousand expedients if they don't pass current. She has keen wit enough ? has but one fault ? that she is not a good woman. The poor girls with such an example before their eyes, no experience of quieter homes and good, innocent, loving people in them, don ?t know what outre things they do and say ? thinking them 'funny.' Grace, describing a drawing room in the newly-taken house, will say to Sally Edwards that it is 'big enough for her to turn a somersault in the drawing-room' &c ? a mild instance. [Jesse] Haney's experiment of uniting the two families has failed ? they can't mix. Instinctively the kind, right-minded Edwards' girls see through the others, which would set Fanny aflame with distrust and dislike. And Mrs [Sarah] Edwards detests her, I am sure, first on account of her writings, secondly, because Jim [Parton] married her ? doing it on the sly, forsooth, for he was really ashamed of the act ? thirdly, because they are and must be, in this life, at least, radically antagonistic. The women who likes [William Makepeace] Thackeray of all writers cannot but be Title: Thomas Butler Gunn Diaries: Volume 10, page 156, March 10-16, 1859 . 16 March 1859. Gunn, Thomas Butler, 1826-1903
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