e, 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.

In fact they were stronger because more absolute, more concentrated in
themselves.

There were no pangs of hunger to distract my attention, no
traditionally patient wife to look sadly at me, no responsibilities for
others lying upon me and my rejected MSS.

Simply all my own desires for myself centred in them.

There was one side issue which at times seemed to include everything,
to be everything in itself, but the moments when this forced itself in
overwhelming prominence upon my brain were few.

The wish that I had to publish my works could not be traced to distinct
motives; it did not spring from a desire to gain money, nor yet
celebrity.

I was not particularly keen on fame while I lived, and I certainly had
no sentimental ideas of my name surviving me.

I cared little in fact whether my name ever reached the public,
provided only my works were known and read. The wish to give them out
was not a thing of motive, nor thought, nor will. It was the fierce,
instinctive impulse that accompanies all creative power, the tremendous
impetus towards production that is an integral part of all conceptive
capacity. The same driving necessity that compels a writer in the
middle of the night to rise and take his pen and commit to paper some
thought or thoughts that are racing about in his brain, trying to find
an outlet, that