it the kind of thing to strike a bliss into the soul of Master Henry or Miss Susan as a birthday present. p. ixIt is all, at this date, so incredible, so shortsighted, so cruel, one could almost say. No one seems to have tried at all: the idea of wooing a child was not in the air—certainly Mary Wollstonecraft had none of it.

p. ix

Who it was that first discerned the child to be a thing of joy, a character apart worth coming to without patronage, a flower, a fairy, I cannot say. But Blake, in his writings, had much to do with the discovery, and Wordsworth perhaps more. Certain, however, is it that Mary Wollstonecraft, even if she had glimmerings of this truth, had no more; and those she suppressed when the pen was in her hand.

I might remark here that the circumstance that Blake’s drawings for Salzmann’s Elements of Morality, which Mary Wollstonecraft translated in 1791, also for Johnson, are more interesting and dramatic, is due to the fact that he merely adapted the work of the German artist. Blake was uniformly below himself in this kind of employment. Only in the rapt freedoms of the angelic harper in his hut, in the picture opposite page 56 of the present work, does he approach his true genius; while in his conception of Mrs. Mason I have no confidence. Not slim and willowy and pensive was she in my mental picture of her: I figure a matron of sterner stuff and solider build.

But having said this against the Original Stories, I have said all, for as the casket enshrining Mrs. Mason its value remains unassailable.

It was well for Mrs. Mason that Mary Wollstonecraft p. xset her on paper in 1788. Had she waited until the Vindication of the Rights of Women was written in 1792 (and dedicated to Talleyrand), had she waited until little Fanny Imlay was born into a stony world, Mrs. Mason would never have been. Because it is the likes of Mrs. Mason that keep the rights of women, as Mary Wollstonecraft saw them, in the background, and demand the production of marriage lines. Mrs. Mason would have been the first to regret the unwomanliness of the publication both of the book and of the baby. The Preface to this book suggests that Mary Wollstonecraft was at that time, before she had loved and lost and suffered, something of a Mrs. Mason herself; but Mrs. Mason remained Masonic to the end, whereas poor Mary’s heart and mind were always in conflict. She may have loved pure Reason, but she loved Gilbert Imlay too. And this Mrs. Mason never did.

p. x

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