Frances Mary Buss and her work for educationRidley, Annie E.
History
Frances Mary Buss and her work for education
Ridley, Annie E.
Buss, Frances Mary, 1827-1894
“I liked Mr. Knox quite as much last Wednesday. He gave me a
hearty welcome, and asked most affectionately for you. From what
Dr. Hodgson says, he is not doing so much on the Merchants’
Company Schools as he was. I lunched at Mr. Pryde’s house, and
then went with him and Mrs. Pryde to the ‘Women’s Medical
Educational Meeting.’ For the first time I heard Miss Jex-Blake
speak; she spoke well. Mr. P. seems sensible and liberal in his
ideas. When you and I were in Edinburgh, it seems Mrs. P. and
two of their children had scarlet fever, and he himself was in
lodgings, away from ‘his own fireside.’ Mrs. P. is quite
‘advanced,’ and, as her husband said, ‘is the most refractory
parent’ he has to do with. ‘She was always wanting something’
(he said before her), ‘or not wanting something else.’ She did
not like her girls to learn so much writing or sewing, for
instance. Their second girl is to be brought up for medicine.
So, you see, Mr. and Mrs. P. must be advanced.
“One day last week, we, _i.e._ Mrs. H., Dr. H., and I went to
lunch with Mrs. MacLaren. Mr. M. is Member for Edinburgh, and
Mrs. and Miss M., as you will perhaps remember, are working for
the Women’s Suffrage. I met there Dr. Guthrie’s youngest son, a
very fine young man, who made a strong impression on me. He is
evidently as fine in mind as in person.”
In speaking of her visits, she had always much to say of the interesting
persons whom she met at Bonaly, and of the talk she so thoroughly
appreciated, well described under the heading, “The Professor at the
Breakfast-Table,” in Mr. Meiklejohn’s “Life of Dr. Hodgson,” as—
“the sparkling table-talk, apt illustration, and racy anecdote
with which the doctor enlivened all the time we sat at table.
Without monopolizing the talk, he never allowed it to flag; and
by manifesting the kindliest interest in the sayings and doings
of all, he induced even the shyest to take his part in a manner
that must have astonished him when he came to look back upon
it.”
Mrs. Hodgson, too, had so much grace and kindness that even this shyest
of her guests was made so much at home as to be “led to imagine that he
must have sat in that particular corner hundreds of times before, though
now for the first time conscious of it.”
Another of Miss Buss’ letters (Sept. 8, 1874) gives an account of the
place itself—
“Bonaly, Sept. 8, 1874.
“Edinburgh, to me, is full of you! So you have been constantly
in my mind since my arrival here, last Friday night.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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