t there is one thing against which I do solemnly protest and uplift
my voice, as a piece of ridiculous injustice and supererogation,--and
that is, that every new poem or fresh story I write and print should be
supposed and declared to be part and parcel of my autobiography. Good
gracious! Goethe himself, "many-sided" as the old stone Colossus might
have been, would have retreated in dismay from such a host of characters
as I have appeared in, according to the announcement of admiring
friends.

My dear creatures, do just look at the common sense of the thing! Can I
have been, by any dexterity known to man, of mind or body, such a
various creature, such a polycorporate animal, as you make me to be?
Because I write the anguish and suffering of an elderly widow with a
drunken husband, am I therefore meek and of middle age, the slave of a
rum-jug? I have heard of myself successively as figuring in the
character of a strong-minded, self-denying Yankee girl,--a
broken-hearted Georgia beauty,--a fairy princess,--a consumptive
school-mistress,--a young woman dying of the perfidy of her lover,--a
mysterious widow; and I daily expect to hear that a caterpillar which
figured as hero in one of my tales was an allegory of myself, and that a
cat mentioned in "The New Tobias" is a travesty of my heart-experience.

Now this is rather more than "human natur" can stand. It is true that in
my day and generation I have suffered as everybody does, more or less.
It is likewise true that I have suffered from the same causes that other
people do. I am happy to state that in the allotments of this life
authoresses are not looked upon as "literary," but simply as women, and
have the same general dispensations with the just and the unjust;
therefore, in attempting to excite other people's sympathies, I have
certainly touched and told many stories that were not strange to my own
consciousness; I do not know very well how I could do otherwise. And in
trying to draw the common joys and sorrows of life, I certainly have
availed myself of experience as well as observation; but I should seem
to myself singularly wanting in many traits which I believe I possess,
were I to obtrude the details of my own personal and private affairs
upon the public. And I offer to those who have so interpreted me a
declaration which I trust may relieve them from all responsibility of
this kind in future; I hereby declare, asseverate, affirm, and whatever
else means to swea