1840s: GCPP Parkes 5/1-41a.
The 52 letters in this section date from the earliest days of the friendship between Barbara and Bessie. Bessie discusses her learning and reading matter, including detailed discussion of Tennyson’s ‘The Princess’; the possibilities for women in work and independent life; her experiments with photography; political matters; writing activity for the Birmingham Journal and the Hastings News; cholera in Hastings; a novel which Bessie began writing in the late 1840s; and travel.
The letters were sent from various addresses including London, Hastings, Brighton, Stourbridge, Hampstead, Malvern, Leam (Warwickshire), and Yoxall Lodge, Staffordshire.