[Mary Caroline Hughes, artist, photographer and amateur scientist, wife of the Welsh geologist Thomas McKenny Hughes.] Autograph ms. of an original study by her of the poetry of John Keats.

The last paragraph of McKenny Hughes’s entry in the Oxford DNB deals with his marriage, noting that his wife was ‘a keen amateur archaeologist, a botanist, and a distinguished artist, and under his tuition she became a valuable geologist’, and that the couple ‘travelled together on field excursions’, being accompanied on a trip to the Balkans by an armed guard. Six boxes of her papers are among the rest of those of the Hughes family in the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge. The present item is 64pp, 4to, mostly on the rectos of a ruled ‘Universal Exercise Book. / 60 Pages One Penny.’ The covers are a bit chipped and the pages a little browned, but the overall condition is good. Signed on the cover ‘By Mary Caroline Hughes’, with ‘Finished M. S. 1’ at the head. The essay is one over which she evidently took great care: there are numerous emendations and additions throughout. Extra passages are inserted on slips, several emendations are pasted over the text. There is no title, the work beginning with a quotation from ‘Sleep and Beauty’: ‘Happy he who trusts / To Clear Futurity his darling Fame’. Although not especially perceptive, Hughes is always readable here. She begins: ‘Although Keats had rested in his grave more than twenty five years before any biography of him was written we of the present day know perhaps more of that April life with its Spring brightness, its sudden storms, its nipping frost, than the friends who know him best.’ Upside down at the back of the exercise book are three pages of pencil notes on Keats.