Publisher's Synopsis
The letters of Lady Duff Gordon are an introduction to her in person. She wrote as she talked, and that is not always the note of private correspondence, the pen being such an official instrument. Readers growing familiar with her voice will soon have assurance that, addressing the public, she would not have blotted a passage or affected a tone for the applause of all Europe. Yet she could own to a liking for flattery, and say of the consequent vanity, that an insensibility to it is inhuman. Her humour was a mouthpiece of nature. She inherited from her father the judicial mind, and her fine conscience brought it to bear on herself as well as on the world, so that she would ask, 'Are we so much better?' when someone supremely erratic was dangled before the popular eye. She had not studied her Goethe to no purpose.
