indeed, the magazine
fiction (in America) of the women shows greater care in phrase and
workmanship than that of the men (who are hurried and harried by
expensive families), and often quite as much virility.

No one ever has found life a lake. Life is a stormy ocean at best, and
if any woman with a real gift prefers to sink rather than struggle,
or to float back to shore on a raft, she deserves neither sympathy nor
respect. Women born with that little tract in their brain sown by
Nature with bulbs of one of the arts, may conquer the world as proudly
as men, although not as quickly, for they rouse in disappointed or
apprehensive men the meanest form of sex jealousy; but if they have as
much courage as talent, if they are willing to dedicate their lives,
not their off hours, to the tending of their rich oasis in the general
desert of mind, success is theirs. Biological differences between the
sexes evaporate before these impersonal sexless gifts (or whims or
inadvertencies) of conservative Nature.

Of course women have worked themselves to death in their passionate
devotion to art. So have men. Women have starved to death in garrets,
their fine efforts rejected by those that buy, and sell again to an
uncertain public. So have men. The dreariest anecdotes of England and
France, so rich in letters, are of great men-geniuses who died young
for want of proper nourishment or recognition, or who struggled on to
middle-age in a bitterness of spirit that corroded their high
endowment. I do not recall that any first-rate women writers have died
for want of recognition, possibly because until now they have been few
and far between. The Brontes died young, but mainly because they lived
in the midst of a damp old churchyard and inherited tubercular
tendencies. The graves and old box tombs crowd the very walls of the
parsonage, and are so thick you hardly can walk between them. I spent
a month in the village of Haworth, but only one night in the village
inn at the extreme end of the churchyard; I could read the
inscriptions on the tombs from my windows.

Charlotte had immediate recognition even from such men as Thackeray,
and if the greater Emily had to wait for Swinburne and posterity it
was inherited consumption that carried her off in her youth. Although
much has been made of their poverty I don't think they were so badly
off for their times. The parsonage is a well-built stone house, their
father had his salary, and the village