Read it through once

Had Mr. Whittaker known what was in store for him he would probably have lost his head; but neither author nor publisher had the faintest notion that the modest volume, then projecting, was to be the forerunner of a series destined to take the world by storm and to be the one effort—apart from dramatic and sonneteering successes, which were to fade into obscurity—by which alone the name of Mary Russell Mitford was to be remembered.