In 1855 Maria Beadnell, who had become Mrs. Henry Winter, wrote to the author, and he agreed to meet her clandestinely. He was unhappily married but not yet separated from his wife. The separation came a few years later. Dickens was disillusioned when he met Mrs. Winter; she was homely and stout. He describes his disillusionment in _Little Dorrit_, where Mrs. Winter is Flora Finching. "Flora whom he had left a lily, had become a peony." And then he gives way to a personal pathetic cry. He could no longer love his first love, he was not in love with his wife; with all his fame and wealth he had missed the greatest pleasure in life. "That he should have missed so much, and at his time of life should look so far about him for any staff to bear him company upon his downward journey and cheer it--was a just regret." He looked into the dying fire by which he sat and reflected that he too would pass through such changes and be gone. Thus we can trace the childwife Dora and the sufferings of Pip to Dickens's first love. Mary Hogarth, who helped to shape Dickens's ideals of women, was a younger sister of his wife, and she died as a girl. Dickens was so shocked by this that he could not go on for a while with his _Pickwick Papers_ and _Oliver Twist_. This was about 1837, when he was twenty-five. He has left a number of records of the great and lasting effect upon him of the grief he felt. He describes a dream where he sees her; he thinks of her when in America. She was his model for Little Nell and he wrote that old wounds bled afresh when he wrote this story. But she was responsible for all those pure, bloodless girls, lacking in individuality, which fill his pages. She died when she was innocent of worldly guile, and unconsciously was the type before him when he drew women. He could not understand the modern intellectual woman and he owes this literary deficiency to his misfortune. "And so he presents to us," says Mr. Pugh, "that galaxy of amazing dolls variously christened Rose Maylie, Kate Nickleby, Madeline Bray, Little Nell, Emma Haredale, Mary Graham, Florence Dombey, Agnes Wickfield, Ada Clare and Lucy Manette.... Modern criticism has exhausted itself in scathing denunciation of these poor puppets. And yet there is perhaps something to be said in defence of the convention that created them. Dickens was never a self-conscious artist. He had indeed no use for the word Art." His female types were the result of his faith in the perfection of woman as he saw it in Mary Hogarth.