Read it through once

The consideration of the manuscript was prolonged, and it was not until the midsummer of the following year (1821), that it was finally returned on its author’s hands as unsuitable. Meanwhile, her friends in London had been busy in her interest and she was now working “as hard as a lawyer’s clerk” in writing for the magazines—poetry, criticism, and dramatic sketches. Confessing to a “natural loathing of pen and ink which that sort of drudgery cannot fail to inspire,” she mentions that she now has no leisure, “scarcely a moment to spare, even for the violets and primroses.” The necessity for polish was impressed upon her. “You would laugh if you saw me puzzling over my prose. You have no notion how much difficulty I find in writing anything at all readable. One cause of this is, my having been so egregious a letter-writer. I have accustomed myself to a certain careless sauciness, a fluent incorrectness, which passed very well with indulgent friends, such as yourself, my dear Sir William, but will not do at all for that tremendous correspondent, the Public. So I ponder over every phrase, disjoint every sentence, and finally produce such lumps of awkwardness, that I really expect, instead of paying me for them, Mr. Colburn and Mr. Baldwin will send me back the trash. But I will improve.... I am now occupied in dramatic sketches for _Baldwin’s Magazine_—slight stories of about one act, developed in fanciful dialogue of loose blank verse. If Mr. Baldwin will accept a series of such articles they will be not merely extremely advantageous to me in a pecuniary point of view (for the pay is well up—they give fifteen guineas a sheet), but excellent exercises for my tragedies. At the same time I confess to you that nothing seems to me so tiresome and unsatisfactory as writing poetry. Ah! how much better I like working flounces! There, when one had done a pattern, one was sure that one had got on, and had the comfort of admiring one’s work and exulting in one’s industry all the time that one was, in fact, indulging in the most comfortable indolence. Well! courage, Missy Mitford! (as _Blackwood’s Magazine_ has the impudence to call me!) _Courage, mon amie!_”