A Woman of Genius
BY MARY AUSTIN
Author of "The Land of Little Rain," "The Arrowmaker," "Isidro,""Christ in Italy," etc., etc.
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1912
Copyright, 1912, by
Doubleday, Page & Co.
All rights reserved, including that oftranslation into foreign languages,including the Scandinavian
TO
LOU HENRY HOOVER
AND SOME PLEASANT MEMORIES
OF
THE RED HOUSE IN HORNTON
STREET
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
It is strange that I can never think of writing any account of my lifewithout thinking of Pauline Mills and wondering what she will say of it.Pauline is rather given to reading the autobiographies of distinguishedpeople—unless she has left off since I disappointed her—and finding inthem new persuasions of the fundamental lightness of her scheme ofthings. I recall very well, how, when I was having the bad time of mylife there in Chicago, she would abound in consoling instances from onethen appearing in the monthly magazines; skidding over the obviousderivation of the biographist's son from the Lord Knows Who, except thatit wasn't from the man to whom she was legally married, to fix on thefoolish detail of the child's tempers and woolly lambs as theadvertisement of that true womanliness which Pauline loves to pluck fromevery feminine bush.
There was also a great deal in that story about a certain othercelebrity, for her relations to whom the writer was blackballed in aclub of which I afterward became a member, and I think it was the thingsPauline said about one of the rewards of genius being the privilege ofassociation with such transcendent personalities on a footing whichpermitted one to call them by their first names in one's reminiscences,that gave me the notion of writing this book. It has struck me ashumorous to a degree, that, in this sort of writing, the reallyimportant things are usually left out.
I thought then of writing the life of an accomplished woman, not so muchof the accomplishment as of the woman; and I have never been able tomake a start at it without thinking of Pauline Mills and that curioussocial warp which obligates us most to impeach the validity of a woman'sopinion at the points where it is most supported by experience. From theearliest I have been rendered highly suspicious of the social estimateof women, by the general social conspiracy against her telling the truthabout herself. But, in fact, I do not think Mrs. Mills will read mybook. Henry will read it first at his office and tell her that he'drather she shouldn't, for Henry has been so successfully Paulined thatit is quite sufficient for any statement of life to lie outside hiswife's accepted bias, to stamp it with insidious impropriety. There isat times something almost heroic in the resolution with which women likePauline Mills defend themselves from whatever might shift the centres oftheir complacency.
But even without Pauline, it interests me greatly to undertake thisbook, of which I have said in the title as much as a phrase may of thescope of the undertaking, for if I know anything of genius it is whollyextraneous, derived, impersonal, flowing through and by. I cannot tellyou what it is, but I hope to show you a little of how I was seized ofit, shaped; what resistances opposed to it; what surrenders. I mean toput as plainly as possible how I felt it fumbling at my earlier lifelike the sea at the foot of a tidal wall, and by what rifts in thestructure of living, its inundation rose upon me; by what practices andpassions I was enlarged to it, and by what well meaning of my frien