ABSTRACT
In London Jane Kerr was liked and admired; but it was in Edinburgh that she became the toast of the learned world and queen of a coterie. Vivacious is the epithet most usually applied to her; the readers hear from several sources of her ‘sparkling vivacity’. Playfair, unperturbed, wrote a very cordial letter, after Mrs Apreece had been in Edinburgh nearly a year, recommending her to a friend of his in London, Miss Mary Berry. The mind in a healthy state must always blend its new impulses with old affections. Without this, its tones are like those of the Aeolian harp, broken, wild, and uncertain, fickle as the wind that produced them, beginning without order, ending without effect. John William Ward, afterwards to become the first Earl of Dudley, and a great friend of Lady Davy’s, had at first written that she was ‘fiercely ugly’.
