Since this volume, whose quality Wood compares to that of the Elizabethan Thomas Campion, is far superior to even the best of O’Neill’s prose, the same question arises as in the case of Louise Labé: how is it that from so articulate a writer, one who rhymed as she breathed, we have no greater quantity of surviving verse? The answer may well be the same, in view of her history. She was born in Pennsylvania, but lived in no state long enough to call it her own. Her father was a bookseller of more literary than practical gifts, and there is little doubt that the swarming, hilarious and penniless family in her first novel[50] is based on her own background. From infancy the gifted child was destined for a stage career, but it was discovered early that she was too high-strung to endure public appearances. She then chose illustrating as her métier, and although self-taught, was already selling drawings in her early teens. From Omaha, where she attended a convent day school, she went alone at fifteen to New York to seek a better market for her work, and lived there in another convent until her marriage three years later. When her husband died, she was twenty-three and already an established illustrator and the financial mainstay of her family. The humorous magazine _Puck_ soon became her chief outlet. She joined its staff, and in 1902 married its editor, Harry Leon Wilson, later famous as author of _Ruggles of Red Gap_ and _Merton of the Movies_. In 1904 O’Neill published _The Loves of Edwy_, which like two of her three subsequent novels, is written in the first person and from a man’s viewpoint. It is significant that the narrator of this story spends his life in fruitless love of the bewitching heroine, a term in jail for an altruistic forgery being the somewhat strained device which deters him from marrying. The girl, who has returned his love since adolescence, finally accepts another man, but a total psychological block prevents her consummating the marriage.