Essays, Descriptive and Biographical

Abstract

LADY PRESTWICH, who survived her husband, Sir Joseph Prestwich, but little more than three years, died in 1899 at the age of sixty-six. They were married in 1870, and settled at Shoreham, near Sevenoaks, in the charming house of Darent-Hulme, built by Prestwich. While he was professor of geology at Oxford, many months in each year were spent in that ancient home of learning, and there Prestwich was constantly assisted by his wife in the preparation, not only of his standard work on geology, but also of his lectures, diagrams and geological papers. Herself an authoress, she had exhibited considerable literary ability in her two novels, “The Harbour Bar” and “Enga,” and in a number of essays printed in Good Words, Blackwood's Mogazine, the Leisure Hour, &c. Some of these are here reprinted. There are “Recollections of Boucher de Perthes,” being the history of the discovery of Palæolithic implements; “Evenings with Madame MohI,” or reminiscences of a Paris salon; “An Evening with Mrs. Somerville”; some account of the parallel roads of Glen Roy, and essays on physiography, all pleasantly and instructively written. One article not previously published is on the old almshouse of Ewelme, and another is on the Findhorn, especially attractive to Lady Prestwich, as her earliest home was in Morayshire, on the banks of this, perhaps the grandest of Scottish rivers.

Essays, Descriptive and Biographical.

By Grace Lady Prestwich. With a memoir by her sister, Louisa E. Milne. Pp. 266. (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1901.) Price 10s. 6d.