It was first seriously thought of in 1830, but proceeded slowly. Life
brought more interruptions to her than it had done in youth--family
events, visits of kindness and pleasure, absorbed much time. Then, too,
she was greatly engrossed by her agency business, to which all else was
made to defer. She was punctual, we are told, not only to the day, but
to the hour, of her payments; and her exertions to have the rents paid
and the money ready for these payments were unvarying. She herself
looked after the repairs, the letting of the village houses, the drains,
gutters and pathways, the employment of the poor,--in short, all the
hundred and one duties that devolve upon the steward of landed property.
It was considered by her family that all this exertion was in no wise
too much for her; that, on the contrary, it was good for her health,
inducing her to walk out and take more exercise than she would have done
without an object in view. Even the very drudgery of accounts and
letters of business, says her stepmother, "though at times almost too
much for her bodily strength, invigorated her mind; and she went from
the rent-book to her little desk and the manuscript of _Helen_ with
renewed vigor. She never wrote fiction with more life and spirit than
when she had been for some time completely occupied with the hard
realities of life."

Nevertheless, _Helen_ progressed slowly, and was several times in danger
of being thrust aside. She wrote to her sister:--

My dear Harriet, can you conceive yourself to be an old lamp at the
point of extinction, and dreading the smell you would make at going
out, and the execrations which in your dying flickerings you might
hear? And then you can conceive the sudden starting up again of the
flame when fresh oil is poured into the lamp. And can you conceive
what that poor lamp would feel returning to light and life? So felt
I when I had read your letter on reading what I sent to you of
_Helen_. You have given me new life and spirit to go on with her. I
would have gone on from principle, and the desire to do what my
father advised--to finish whatever I began; but now I feel all the
difference between working for a dead or a live horse.

To the day of her death Miss Edgeworth never became the prudent, staid,
self-contained person we should imagine her from her books, did we
possess them only as guides to her character. _Rosamond_ remained as