The Courtship of Mrs. Elton
 in
The Compleat Mrs. Elton
by
Diana Birchall
The compleat Mrs Elton
Paperback - 216 pages (August 2004)
Egerton House Publishing    ISBN: 195016018
amazon.com
 amazon.co.uk
 amazon.ca

        Review by Linda Waldemar, January 23, 2005 .
This is a short story that describes how Miss Augusta Hawkins became Mrs. Philip Elton. It is necessarily very short in keeping with the courtship that it describes.

Miss Hawkins is was spending the February in Bath. Although there was not much society to be had that time of year, it was better than her home in Birmingham and the retired society of Maple Grove. "If a young woman does not find a husband at home, she must venture farther afield; fortunate it was for Augusta, that in her eight or nine years of young ladyhood, she had contrived a network of friends and acquaintances who were all alive with eagerness to welcome her as the most desirable guest there could possibly be."

As it turns out, February was also the time that Mr. Elton, spurned by Miss Woodhouse had taken himself to Bath. He had gone there with the determined intent of finding a suitable wife.

"If our lovers were in fact a venial pair, marrying only in a spirit of self-seeking, how much worse were they than half the world? It was such a perfect case of like marrying like, that the most elevated love between two pure soul could be no more perfectly matched."