"Mrs. Gresham and Miss Dunstable" by John Everett Millais

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Mrs. Gresham and Miss Dunstable

Artist: John Everett Millais

Engraver: The Dalziels

1861

Wood engraving

7 x 4 1/2 inches

Signed with monogram

Source: Project Gutenberg e-version of Framley Parsonage

From Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage with six illustrations by Sir John Everett Millais. First serialised 1860-1861 in Cornhill Magazine then published as a book in 1861.

See below for passage illustrated.

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Anthony Trollope

Framley Parsonage

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Passage illustrated

At the present moment Miss Dunstable was staying at Boxall Hill with Mrs. Frank Gresham. They had left London,—as, indeed, all the world had done, to the terrible dismay of the London tradesmen. This dissolution of Parliament was ruining everybody except the country publicans, and had of course destroyed the London season among other things. . . .

Miss Dunstable, at Boxall Hill or at Greshamsbury, was a very different person from Miss Dunstable in London; and it was this difference which so much vexed Mrs. Gresham; not that her friend omitted to bring with her into the country her London wit and aptitude for fun, but that she did not take with her up to town the genuine goodness and love of honesty which made her loveable in the country. She was as it were two persons, and Mrs. Gresham could not understand that any lady should permit herself to be more worldly at one time of the year than at another—or in one place than in any other.

"Well, my dear, I am heartily glad we've done with that," Miss Dunstable said to her, as she sat herself down to her desk in the drawing-room on the first morning after her arrival at Boxall Hill.

"What does 'that' mean?" said Mrs. Gresham.

"Why, London and smoke and late hours, and standing on one's legs for four hours at a stretch on the top of one's own staircase, to be bowed at by any one who chooses to come. That's all done—for one year, at any rate."

"You know you like it."

"No, Mary; that's just what I don't know. I don't know whether I like it or not. Sometimes, when the spirit of that dearest of all women, Mrs. Harold Smith, is upon me, I think that I do like it; but then again, when other spirits are on me, I think that I don't."

Bibliography

Millais, John Guille. The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais. London: Methuen, 1900.

Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1883.

Trollope, Anthony. Framley Parsonage. Project Gutenberg E-text prepared by Andrew Turek and revised by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.

Last modified 27 September 2013