There is no evidence that Marianne, Flossy or Julia  wrote for publication, but Elizabeth’s second daughter, Margaret, affectionately called Meta, had a story published in Charles Dickens’ Household Words, July 4^th, 1857. The story was called ‘Helena Mathewson’. It was seventeen columns long and split into nine chapters.

In 1857 Meta was twenty and had just met Captain Charles Hill on the way to Rome; just a month after her return, he became her fiancé, an engagement that was to end by May 1858.

‘Helen Mathewson’ begins in a small northern town named Lichendale ‘one of the smallest boroughs in England[and…] at the passing of the Reform Bill, everyone thought it likely to become a populous seaport’ . Elizabeth certainly liked to write about places she knew (as many women did) and therefore if Meta was following her mother’s lead, Lichendale could be a nod to Silverdale where the family spent many happy summers, or Pen-Morfa, close to Tre-Madoc in North Wales where Elizabeth’s uncle lived.

This area was well known to the Holland family and Elizabeth used it to begin her story ‘The Well of Pen-Morfa’ where the long opening paragraph is written in the style of a travelogue. The narrator explains how the village declined after the land had been reclaimed from the sea and the cottages were no longer lashed by the winter tides.  Meta’s Lichendale may be an amalgam of these two places with some added imaginative licence. However,  unlike her mother, Meta does not use the setting to create atmosphere or give topographical information,  she merely illustrates the conflicting feelings among the local inhabitants about the progressive plans for the town. Her idea concurs with Rousseau’s political theory of the corrupt city and the more natural and therefore moral countryside, a belief that was common during the Romantic period.   Stereotypically, it is the older people who are ‘terrified at the prospect of change’, others felt that the sea ‘receding form the town’ mark the place as ‘doomed to sink into a quiet decay…’ just like Pen-Morfa.

Lichendale is the home of Helena and her two older brothers, Paul and Lawrence Mathewson, whose father is the rector of the ‘grand old parish church’. The family is brought up in an Anglican tradition and has no mother. Motherless families – or families with inadequate mother figures – are recurring features of Elizabeth’s writing but here there is no sense that the lack of a mother figure meant no moral guidance.

Again, like Elizabeth, Meta uses contrasts to draw attention to the opposite personalities of these two brothers, although her writing is far less strikingly developed than Elizabeth’s.  Paul Mathewson (the elder of the two) is serious, morally upstanding and disliked any ‘unnecessary shows of affection’ which he deemed ‘harmful’. This made him rather less attractive than his warm-hearted, high-spirited and charismatic brother, Lawrence. Lawrence was a firm favourite with his younger sister, Helena, but Meta shows how these characters should not be taken at face value. Without family guidance, Lawrence becomes dissolute and reckless, despite the fact that in their youth  Helena and Lawrence were almost inseparable until the latter went to Italy at a very young age to further his studies.

The use of Italy in the story is not surprising as Elizabeth, Meta, Marianne and Catherine Winkworth had returned from Rome at the end of May 1857, just over a month before ‘Helena Mathewson’ was published.  However, the way Meta uses Rome is very different from Elizabeth’s presentation of the ‘Eternal City’.  When Lawrence is given permission to go to Rome, Helena explains:

My father had lived for so long in Lichendale. That he seemed to have forgotten how full of danger a city like Rome would be to one eager and reckless like Lawrence.

Meta’s Rome becomes a place of death and dissipation for two of her main characters, Lawrence Mathewson and the local landowner, Sir Edward Stamford. Elizabeth, on the other hand, makes Rome a place of life-affirming energy and healing. In ‘A Dark Night’s Work’, Rome is where Ellinor goes to recover from the illness caused by her father’s secret and her broken engagement , and where Elizabeth herself went to recover from the troubles she experienced while writing  The Life of Charlotte Brontë, as well as to escape from the backlash that she knew would follow its publication. Rome became her haven, the place where she met her long-term friend Charles Eliot Norton and where she claims to have spent the happiest days of her life: ‘I shall never be so happy again. I don’t think I was ever so happy before’ [Letters p. 476].