Writing board

This board is carved on one side with flowers, butterflies and a dragonfly. It was made by Elma Stuart, an author and nutritionist who befriended Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) in 1872. For the last eight years of Evans’s life the pair exchanged letters. Mary Ann called Elma ‘daughter’ and when Stuart died in 1903 she was buried next to her ‘mother’ in Highgate Cemetery East. On 12th January 1878 Mary Ann wrote to Elma to thank her for some gifts including this board: 'I am at this moment writing on the really beautiful writing -board. It is not too heavy, because I rest it on the elbows of my chair, and the graining and colour, as well as the art spent on it, are soothing to my outward and inward sense.'