Emily Eden

Emily Eden (3 March 1797 – 5 August 1869) was an English poet and novelist who gave witty pictures of English life in the early 19th century.

Born in Westminster, Eden was the seventh daughter of William Eden, 1st Baron Auckland, and his wife Eleanor Elliot. She was the great-great-great-aunt of Anthony Eden. In her late thirties, she and her sister Fanny travelled to India, where her brother George Eden, 1st Earl of Auckland was in residence there as Governor-General from 1835 to 1842. She wrote accounts of her time in India, later collected in the volume Up The Country: Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India (1867). She also wrote two very successful novels, The Semi-Detached House (1859) and The Semi-Attached Couple (1860). The latter was written in 1829 but not published until 1860. Both novels have a comic touch that critics have compared with Jane Austen, who was Emily's favorite author. In addition, her letters were published by Violet Dickinson, a close friend of Virginia Woolf. The letters contain some memorable comments on English public life, most famously her welcome for the new King William IV: "an immense improvement on the last unforgiving animal (George IV)—this man at least wishes to make everybody happy."

Emily never married and was financially well-off enough that she did not need to write but did so out of passion for the art. After the death of Caroline Lamb, mutual friends hoped she might marry Lord Melbourne, who had become a close friend, although she claimed to find him "bewildering" and to be shocked by his profanity. Melbourne's biographer Lord David Cecil remarks that it might have been an excellent thing if they had married but "love is not the child of wisdom, and neither of them wanted to."