Ebook The Journals of Lady Knightley of Fawsley

These selections from the private Journals of the late Lady Knightley are given to the world in obedience to her own wishes. Some years ago, she expressed a hope that it might be possible to publish some portions of her journals, and asked me to undertake the task. This request was confirmed in a letter found among her papers after her death. "Not," the writer added modestly, "that the story of my life is worth telling, but because, I think, some of the things that it contains may interest and amuse my friends, and possibly appeal to a wider public." The present volume begins with the journal first started by Lady Knightley in 1856, and carries the story down to the year 1884. This period includes the whole of her childhood and youth, as well as fifteen years of her married life, and ends with the death of the Duke of Albany, with whom she had been closely connected in the lifetime of her father, Sir Edward Bowater. Some parts of the journal, relating to important public events or family affairs, have been supplemented by passages from Lady Knightley's weekly letters to her mother, Lady Bowater, who lived to an advanced age and only died, at her home in Richmond Park, in the year 1892.