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the author. She had a feminine love of dress and female employments, was fond of fine needlework, and, till she had a maid, mended her own stockings.” Jane’s biography of Agnes received some cruel reviews. The Athenaeum announced that it was “one of those books which might as well not have been written …[the author] is perpetually reminding us of the number of balls to which her sister was taken, the number of country houses which she visited, and the number of genteel persons who drove her out in their own carriages.” Jane’s loving, but banal, memories of her dauntingly intelligent older sister provided an excuse for Agnes’s male rivals to dismiss her achievements with misogynist glee. “We have not yet arrived,” sniffed The Northern Whig, “at that stage of evolution when women can rank as historians of the first order.” Jane was crushed by these comments. Her health, already poor, suffered. Within a few months, she was laid in a grave next to Agnes’s splendid marble monument in the graveyard of St. Edmund’s Church, Southwold.

Catharine didn’t want to belittle Agnes’s leather-bound royal biographies. She was too fond of Jane, and had too much experience herself of misogynist brushoffs from professional men, to reply to these unkind reviews on Jane’s behalf. However, she was saddened by Jane’s book because Jane had scarcely mentioned either Susanna or Catharine herself. Samuel Strickland was allowed a walk-on part as the author of Twenty-seven years in Canada West, “which contains everything necessary for a settler to know.” But there was no reference to the literary achievements of Agnes’s youngest sisters, who had written much better, more helpful books about Canada. Catharine wanted to record a fuller picture of the gifted Strickland family.

Agnes and Jane Strickland’s gravestones in the graveyard of St. Edmund’s Church, Southwold. A great-niece of Catharine sent her this picture.

Scratch, scratch, scratch … the steel nib started moving quickly across the page. Catharine had always been a fluent and fast writer, and old age had not slowed her down. “We passed our days,” she wrote, smiling at the Reydon memories, “in the lonely old house in sewing, walking in the lanes, sometimes going to see the sick and carry food or little comforts to the cottagers; but reading was our chief resource.” Catharine enjoyed penning these “pictures of old world life,” as she described them to one publisher, “which will amuse if not astonish the reader taking him back into bygone scenes even to the past days of the former century …” At the other end of her own lifetime and on the other side of the Atlantic, she acknowledged that she and her sisters had been part of an extraordinarily rich literary tradition, a uniquely Old World legacy which she had absorbed, and of which her own children and grandchildren had no notion. Before Thomas Strickland’s death, the household at Reydon Hall had included servants to cook, clean, launder, press, garden, dust, sweep, preserve and bake. Thomas’s young daughters had the time to furnish their minds from his library. Catharine scribbled down her memories of how they had penned historical dramas, “embellished according to the invisible genius of their fertile minds,” and “ransacked the library for books.” She described how Agnes, when only twelve, could recite from memory whole scenes from Shakespeare and lengthy passages from Milton’s Paradise Lost. She smiled as she remembered how she had thrown herself into the role of Ariel in a Reydon Hall production of The Tempest.

Scratch, scratch, scratch … the pen moved faster and faster as memories flocked back. Catharine recalled how Elizabeth had excelled at quick sketches of village characters, including John Fenn the rat-catcher, old Catchpole the mole-catcher and “some old women reputed to be witches but really very harmless creatures.” She wrote of Jane’s cloud of curls and Sarah’s sense of style: “When dressed in her riding habit and Spanish hat and feathers she certainly made a striking appearance.” But the sister she recalled with the deepest and