Selected Letters of Anne Steele

The 24 letters below belong primarily to the correspondence between Anne Steele and her half-sister, Mary Steele Wakeford (1724-72), portions of which involve courtship, love, and the profession of poetry. These letters are laced with a degree of wit and sophistication that elevate their prose in surprising ways. 

For more on the life of Anne Steele, click here for her entry in Biographical Summaries; for selections from her poetry, click here; for a selection from her prose meditations, click here; for her complete set of hymns from the Bristol Collection (1769), click here.  For biographical information on Mary Steele Wakeford, click here; for selections from her poetry, click here. For a fully annotated edition of Anne Steele's complete correspondence, see Whelan, gen. ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 2 (ed. Julia B. Griffin), pp. 257-332.