Read it through once

From now, on to the close of the year 1815, there is no record of any work of Miss Mitford’s, unless we except one or two odes and sonnets of which she said the first were “above her flight, requiring an eagle’s wing,” while of the latter she “held them in utter abhorrence.” Her time really seems to have been taken up with an occasional visit to London and into Hampshire (where she inspected her old birthplace, Alresford); with short excursions into Oxfordshire (within an easy drive out and back from home), and largely with a voluminous correspondence, chiefly on literary topics, with Sir William Elford. Fortunately this correspondence was not wasted labour as she was able to embody a very large proportion of it in the _Recollections of a Literary Life_. Indeed, had she not specifically suggested the plan of that work many years later, we should feel justified in believing that, from the very outset, it was to such an end that her correspondence and literary criticism were directed.