Letter from Maria Edgeworth to Mrs Margaret Ruxton.
19 Nov 1813.
Tell me whether you have seen Madame de Staël’s Essai sur la Fiction, prefixed to Zulma, Adelaide, and Pauline—the essay is excellent: I shall be curious to know whether you think as I do of Pauline.
Source: The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, ed. by Augustus J. C. Hare, 2 vols (London: Edward Arnold, 1894), I, 220.
Notes: The ‘History of Pauline’ is one of the novellas in Zulma, and Other Tales.

Letter from Sarah Harriet Burney to Elizabeth Carrick.
[6 Dec 1813].
I am not sufficiently fond of dissertations, of eternal analysis, of eloquent bubbles, to be a warm partizan of Mde de Staal [sic]. […] Do you agree with me in thinking, that with all her brilliant varnish, she is corrupt at heart? Had Satan himself written ‘Pauline’, one of the Stories published with ‘Zulma’, he could have produced nothing more offensive to decency—more detestably disgusting.
Source: The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, ed. by Lorna J. Clark (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. 176.
Notes: The date is from the postmark. Elizabeth Carrick was the wife of Andrew Carrick, M.D. in Clifton.

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