Upon the death of both mother and brother, “Mary” submits to her mother’s dying wish and to pressure from her father, and marries a boy who is joint heir to the family property. Her only thought is of providing a stable home for Ann. Without the marriage’s being consummated—the mere approach of the husband sickens “Mary”—the weak and egocentric boy embarks on the conventional Grand Tour of the continent to complete his education, and Ann moves in as “Mary’s” companion. “Before she enjoyed Ann’s constant society she imagined it would have made her completely happy; she was disappointed, and yet knew not what to complain of.”[10] At her father’s death her husband proposes to return, but the thought of him still makes her ill. “There was no previous attachment to give rise to her revulsion. Her friendship with Ann had occupied her whole heart and resembled a passion.”[11] This husband, so pallid a figment, was extraneous to the real Mary’s experience. Actually she and a sister had launched a school for young girls, for which she had had superficial preparation as a governess, in order to provide a home for Fanny. The latter had once expressed a wish to live with Mary, but after much procrastination and one brief trial of life with the two struggling sisters, she returned to her own wretched home. Presently she married her vacillating suitor, whom in fact Mary had brought to terms with a few privately delivered home truths—quite simply that Fanny’s incipient tuberculosis was due to his long indecision. After achieving this selfless end Mary fell ill, for the second time in her life, the first having followed her mother’s death five years earlier. In the novel Ann, unmarried and ailing, is taken to Lisbon by “Mary,” and dies there despite the beneficial change of climate. In reality it was her husband’s business which took Fanny there, and pregnancy which aggravated her pulmonary weakness. Gravely ill, she sent a desperate appeal to Mary, who threw over her teaching, borrowed ruinously to finance the journey, and even so, arrived in Lisbon only a few hours before Fanny’s confinement and a few days before her death. The _Fiction_ was written subsequent not only to that loss but to Mary’s first efforts at journalism and her resulting encounter with the artist Henry Fuseli. Almost at once she loved Fuseli passionately. He, however, was married, and his wife quite naturally vetoed Mary’s incredibly naïve proposal to become one of the household. The girl, now twenty-six, believed her own passion to be purely “platonic.” One biographer of Fuseli reports her as saying to him, “If I thought my passion criminal I would conquer it or die in the attempt, for immodesty in my eyes is ugliness.”[12] In the _Fiction_ “Henry” figures as an ailing violinist met in Lisbon during Ann’s last illness and loved later in maternal fashion, but made inaccessible by Mary’s own married state.