t to leave England:

"Dearest Sister--Our admiration of your talents, our veneration for your
character, our gratitude for the eminent services your writings render
our sex, our people, our faith, in which the sacred cause of true
religion is embodied: all these motives combine to induce us to intrude
on your presence, in order to give utterance to sentiments which we are
happy to feel and delighted to express. Until you arose, it has, in
modern times, never been the case that a Woman in Israel should stand
forth the public advocate of the faith of Israel; that with the depth
and purity of feelings which is the treasure of woman, and with the
strength of mind and extensive knowledge that form the pride of man, she
should call on her own to cherish, on others to respect, the truth as it
is in Israel.

"You, dearest Sister, have done this, and more. You have taught us to
know and appreciate our dignity; to feel and to prove that no female
character can be ... more pure than that of the Jewish maiden, none more
pious than that of the woman in Israel. You have vindicated our social
and spiritual equality with our brethren in the faith: you have, by your
own excellent example, triumphantly refuted the aspersion, that the
Jewish religion leaves unmoved the heart of the Jewish woman. Your
writings place within our reach those higher motives, those holier
consolations, which flow from the spirituality of our religion, which
urge the soul to commune with its Maker and direct it to His grace and
His mercy as the best guide and protector here and hereafter...."

Her example fell like seed upon fertile soil, for Abigail Lindo, Marian
Hartog, Annette Salomon, and especially Anna Maria Goldsmid, a writer of
merit, daughter of the well-known Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, may be
considered her disciples, the fruit of her sowing.

The Italian poetess, Rachel Morpurgo, a worthy successor of Deborah
Ascarelli and Sara Copia Sullam, was contemporaneous with Grace Aguilar,
though her senior by twenty-six years. Our interest in her is heightened
by her use of the Hebrew language, which she handled with such
consummate skill that her writings easily take rank with the best of
neo-Hebraic literature. A niece of the famous scholar S. D. Luzzatto,
she was born at Triest, April 8, 1790. Until the age of twelve she
studied the Bible, then she read Bechai's "Duties of the Heart" and
Rashi's commentary, and from her fourteenth to her sixteenth year sh