The letters that passed between Mark Pattison--revered scholar and renowned educational reformer--and Meta Bradley--Pattison's cherished friend and confidante--are among the most remarkable and intimate records of middle-class life in Victorian England. Often moving, sometimes sad, they tell the story of an extraordinary friendship between the Rector of an Oxford college, a married man in his seventies, and a woman some forty years his junior. In character Pattison was an original, the possible prototype for George Eliot's Dr. Casaubon in Middlemarch. After his marriage to the beautiful and...