The mistress (Mrs. Forster) was "a very well-disposed, conscientious old gentlewoman", but incapable of proper superintendence: "Four volumes of the Spectator constituted the whole school library."
Eliza gained a profound admiration for the poet William Mason, then a York celebrity, especially on account of his "Monody" upon his wife's death, but was shocked at seeing him "a little fat old man of hard-favoured countenance", devoted to whist.
When Eliza was 17, accident brought to her father's house a Scottish advocate, Archibald Fletcher, "of about forty-three, and of a grave, gentlemanlike, prepossessing appearance."
They carried on a literary correspondence for a year, and after another meeting became engaged, though her father opposed the union, preferring a higher suitor, Lord Grantley.
[1] Fletcher's Autobiography, of which a few copies had been printed for private circulation in Carlisle in 1874, was published at Edinburgh the following year under the editorship of her surviving child, the widow of Sir John Richardson, the Arctic explorer.