Note 10b — JOURNAL TO STELLA

Ann Long was sister to Sir James Long, and niece to Colonel Strangeways. Once a beauty and toast of the Kit-Cat Club, she fell into narrow circumstances through imprudence and the unkindness of her friends, and retired under the name of Mrs. Smythe to Lynn, in Norfolk, where she died in 1711 (see Journal, December 25, 1711). Swift said, “She was the most beautiful person of the age she lived in; of great honour and virtue, infinite sweetness and generosity of temper, and true good sense” (Forster’s Swift, 229). In a letter of December 1711, Swift wrote that she “had every valuable quality of body and mind that could make a lady loved and esteemed.”