Call the vetwife
ON a quiet afternoon it’s worth spending a few hours with King Canute, Izaak Walton and Jane Austen, unlikely companions now gathered in death at Winchester Cathedral. Each came to mind in April after a visit: Canute when I contemplated the incoming tide of ground elder into the herbaceous border; Walton when I managed to bank an early brace of browns; and dear Jane during my search for a Sealyham suitor.
Miss Austen steadily championed love as the main prerequisite for marriage, refuting the usual 18th-century principle that fortune and station were. And she is, of course, right, though there’s something brutally honest in marital prospects being weighed by families and arranged accordingly. Which, I confess, was the fate that befell Betsy.
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