The Delight in Common ObjectsGARDENS AND PLANTS IN THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF MARY RUSSELL MITFORDPart Three: The Years of Stoic Decline

摘要

Through the rest of the 1840s Miss Mitford's health continued to worsen (she seems to have suffered above all from some extreme form of arthritis - rheumatoid arthritis, perhaps) and she wrote much less, being content, once freed from her father's expensive demands, to live largely on her Civil List pension. Interestingly, however, the 'spring of her watch' didn't break as she had prophesied: she didn't immediately die; she didn't even collapse into apathy. Indeed, not only did she live for another thirteen years but some of the letters she wrote in those years are as lively and as full of love for the natural world and for the plants growing in what she once described to Miss Barrett as 'that great nosegay my garden' ф those she had written to Sir William thirty years before.