Emily Eden, from a drawing by George Richmond. MEL, facong p. 397.

An intelligent observer of life and politics, Emily was a constant, witty and confidential letter-writer. She was fond of her family and women friends, and slowly gained confidence in independent friendships with men. In her thirties she formed a close, chaste relationship with the recently widowed Lord Melbourne, refusing his probably half-meant proposal of marriage. (‘He frightens me and bewilders me, and he swears too much,’ she protested to her friend Theresa Lister in January 1832 (MEL 215). Soon after that she wrote a novel, The Semi-Attached Couple, describing a tissue of misunderstandings between a newly married, aristocratic couple – a novel with Jane Austen-like overtones and imaginative psychological depth, in which a senior politician, ‘Mr G’, who becomes Prime Minister, is an idealized combination of Melbourne and her brother George. — Brigid Allen

Biographical Material & Discussions

Bibliography

Allen, Brigid. George and Emily Eden: Pride, Privilege, the Empire and the Whigs. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2024.

Eden, Emily. Miss Eden’s Letters. Ed. Violet Dickinson. London: Macmillan, 1919 [MEL].

_____. Letters from India. 2 vols. Ed. Eleanor Eden. London: Bentley, 1872 [LI].

_____. Portraits of the Princes & People of India, drawn on the stone by L. Dickinson. J. Dickinson & Son, 1844. Internet Archive, from a copy in the Caroline Simpson Library, Caroline Simpson Collection, Museums of History NSW. Web. 7 January 2025.

_____. The Semi-Attached Couple, by the author of The Semi-Detached House. London: Bentley, 1860.

_____. The Semi-Attached Couple & The Semi-Detached House, with an introduction by Valerie Grosvenor Myer. New York: Dial Press, 1982.


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Created 23 May 2020

Last modified 10 January 2025