Mary’s existence up to 1775 had been, save when disturbed by family storms, quiet, lonely, and uneventful. As yet no special incident had occurred in it, nor had she been awakened to intellectual activity. But in Hoxton she contracted a friendship which, though it was with a girl of her own age, was always esteemed by her as the chief and leading event in her existence. This it was which first aroused her love of study and of independence, and opened a channel for the outpouring of her too long suppressed affections. Her love for Fanny Blood was the spark which kindled the latent fire of her genius.... From the moment they met until they were separated by poor Fanny’s untimely death, Mary never wavered in her devotion and its active expression, nor could the vicissitudes and joys of her later life destroy her loving loyalty to the memory of her first and dearest friend. “When a warm heart has strong impressions,” she wrote in a letter long years afterward, “they are not to be effaced. Emotions become sentiments; and the imagination renders even transient sensations permanent, by fondly retracing them. I cannot without a thrill of delight recollect views I have seen, which are not to be forgotten, nor looks I have felt in every nerve, which I shall never more meet. The grave has closed over a dear friend, the friend of my youth; still she is present with me, and I hear her soft voice warbling as I stray over the heath.” ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL: ‘Life of Mary Wollstonecraft.’ (Famous Women Series.) Boston: Roberts Bros., 1884. * * * * * [Sidenote: Unfortunate experience.] It is singularly unfortunate that Mary Wollstonecraft was fated, as it were, to see the unattractive side of almost all the great institutions of society with which she was brought into contact: marriage, education, particularly religious education as administered at Eton, and aristocratic life. Her views on all these subjects were colored by her own personal experiences. She generalized from particulars, and never suspected that such a one-sided view must be partially unfair. C. KEGAN PAUL: _Prefatory Memoir_ to Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘Letters to Imlay.’ London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1879. * * * * * [Sidenote: Impressions of married life.] [The family life of the Blood household, of which Mary was for a time, after her mother’s death, an inmate, was as utterly unhappy as that of the Wollstonecrafts: Mr. Blood being “a ne’er-do-well and a drunkard.” Mary was “an immediate witness” of similar and still more painful scenes in the home of her sister Eliza, who had married a Mr. Bishop, a man described by one of his own friends as “either a lion or a spaniel--” fawning abroad, tyrannical at home. I subjoin extracts from two of Mary’s letters to her other sister, Everina, which seem to me to illustrate her experience more forcibly than the narrative of her biographers.] December, 1783.