Aet. 42, to a woman of letters. The person informing George Moore about convent life was Virginia Crawford, a survivor of the grotesque Crawford vs. Crawford and Dilke divorce case in the mid 1880s. The first paragraph of this letter may allude to that scandalous affair.
In “A Legal Laundry” (Hawk, 12 August 1890) George had observed, with specific reference to the Crawford case, the demoralizing effect of divorce trials on the general public. The case was also mentioned in his “Farewell to 1886” (Bat, 4 January 1887).
Lena’s “first act” may have been her translation of a play by Ivan Turgenev.
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