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206 In 1820 she returned to England, and soon after published her first book, entitled “Views of Society and Manners in America.” This was something new, and met a public need, as was evinced by its rapid sale, while it brought its author for the first time in her life prominently before the public.

Desiring to study the theory of a republican form of government from every possible point of view, she went in the following year to Trance, where she remained during three years, Although, as a woman, young, handsome, talented, wealthy, and her own mistress, she was exposed to every possible temptation, she yet maintained, even in this mad whirlpool of folly and dissipation, her studious habits, and her unsullied purity of character and principles. "Experience had taught me,” she says, “in very childhood, how little was to be learned in drawing-rooms, and inspired me with a disgust for frivolous reading, conversation, and occupation.”