I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born for religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual life begins again.
From Mary Augusta Ward
How little those who are schoolgirls of today can realize what it was to be a schoolgirl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century!
As far as intellectual training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were practically wasted.
We believed that growth through Local Government, and perhaps through some special machinery for bringing the wishes and influence of women of all classes to bear on Parliament, other than the Parliamentary vote, was the real line of progress.
But the mind travels far - and mysteriously - in sleep.
So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.
A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.
In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.
The answer, of course, in the mouth of a Christian teacher is that in Christianity alone is there both present joy and future hope.
My grandmother made her home at Fox How under the shelter of the fells, with her four daughters, the youngest of whom was only eight when their father died.
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