The mechanical work of embodying an idea in a
manuscript was as nothing to me.
To write came to me as naturally as to speak.
Therefore work had not been wanting. Manuscript after manuscript had
been completed, submitted to various publishers, and returned with
thanks, with commendation, and regrets that I had not written
something totally different.
And there they all stood in a pile, an irritating, distracting pile,
a monument of unrequited labour, an unrealised capital, a silent
testimony to the exceeding narrowness of the limits of British
indulgence to talent.
My persistent ill-luck was all the more aggravating as I was not
handicapped by poverty, as so many authors are. The question of
terms had not been one to present a difficulty.
I had no need to ask a publisher to accept my MSS. at his own
financial risk.
I was not the traditional struggling young writer of the lady
novelist who treats poverty and genius as convertible terms, making
up with the former quality whatever her hero lacks of the other.
No; although the combination may be very romantic, I confess,
notwithstanding that I was an unrecognised author, I was not living
in a garret, nor writing my MSS. by the proverbially flaring candle,
nor going without my dinner in order to pay for foolscap.
But my feelings were as bitter, and the sense of disappointment as
sharp, as any attic-dwelling genius' could have been, even if we
suppose the lady novelist to have thrown in a conventionally
consumptive wife.
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