Ah, my friend! You do not know the ineffable delight, the exquisite pleasure, which arises from the unison of affection and desire, when the whole soul and senses are abandoned to a lively imagination that renders every emotion delicate and rapturous. Yes; these are emotions over which satiety has no power and the recollection of which even disappointment cannot disenchant, but they do not exist without self-denial. These emotions, more or less strong, appear to me to be the distinctive characteristics of genius, the foundation of taste, and of that exquisite relish for the beauties of nature, of which the common herd of eaters and drinkers and child-begetters certainly have no idea. You will smile at an observation that has just occurred to me: I consider those minds as the most strong and original whose imagination acts as the stimulus to their senses.[17] Here is a summing up of the wisdom gained from three love affairs, two physically unfulfilled, the third disillusioning. The passage also foreshadows her relations with Godwin, whose own description of their courtship runs as follows: The partiality which we conceive for each other ... grew with equal advances in the mind of each.... One sex did not take the priority which long established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that either party can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the toil spreader or the prey, in the affair.... It was friendship melting into love.[18] In Mary’s eyes, Fuseli, Fanny, and she herself evidently bore some of the stigmata of genius. Imlay, business man, extrovert, casual adventurer, impetuous lover, was of “the common herd of child-begetters.” Hers is definitely the feminine romantic ideal of the subjective aspects of Love outweighing the physical to a point where the sex of the partner is less important than his personality. Thus, we have in the last dozen years of the eighteenth century two novels which sounded the keynotes of much that has followed. Diderot analyzed an overtly homosexual woman and pronounced her wholly pathological and destructive, even though he assigned much of the responsibility for her divagations to the environment in which her entire life was spent. Wollstonecraft’s novel idealized an innocent variant relationship as the highest form of emotional experience. Numerous variations on both these themes appear in the succeeding century and a half. The Novel Before 1870