Transcribed from the 1921 Humphrey Milford edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org. Second proof by Margaret Price. LETTERS FROM THE CAPE BY LADY DUFF GORDON Edited by JOHN PURVES * * * * * LONDON HUMPHREY MILFORD 1921 * * * * * PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS EDITOR’S FOREWORD IF Lady Duff Gordon’s ‘Letters from the Cape’ are less familiar to the present generation of readers than those of the Lady Anne Barnard, the neglect is due in great part to the circumstances of their publication. After appearing in a now-forgotten miscellany of Victorian travel, Galton’s _Vacation Tourists_, third series (1864), where their simplicity and delicate unprofessional candour gave them a brief hour of public esteem, they were first issued separately as a supplement to Lady Duff Gordon’s _Last Letters from Egypt_, occupying the latter portion of a volume to which the writer’s daughter, Mrs. Ross, contributed a short but vivid memoir, which touched but lightly on her South African experiences; and they have never appeared, we believe, in any other form. Yet they are inferior in nothing but political interest to those of the authoress of ‘Auld Robin Gray’. Indeed, in her intellectual equipment, her temperament, and her gift of style, Lady Duff Gordon was a far rarer creature than the jovial and managing Scotswoman who was the correspondent of Dundas. And in human sympathy—the quality that has kept Lady Anne Barnard’s letters alive—Lady Duff Gordon shows a still wider range and a yet keener sensibility. Her letters are the fine flower of the English epistolary literature of the Cape. Few books of their class have better deserved reprinting.