Zitat des Tages von Mary Augusta Ward:
A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.
But no man has a monopoly of conscience.
How little those who are schoolgirls of today can realize what it was to be a schoolgirl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century!
Our children, two daughters and a son, were born in 1874, 1876, and 1879.
It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.
I cannot hope that what I have to say will be very interesting to many.
But the mind travels far - and mysteriously - in sleep.
So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.
For nine years, till the spring of 1881, we lived in Oxford, in a little house north of the Parks, in what was then the newest quarter of the University town.
As far as intellectual training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were practically wasted.
But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term.
I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born for religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual life begins again.
In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.
We believed that growth through Local Government, and perhaps through some special machinery for bringing the wishes and influence of women of all classes to bear on Parliament, other than the Parliamentary vote, was the real line of progress.
English girls' schools today providing the higher education are, so far as my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing rise in the intellectual standards of women which has taken place in the last half-century.
My grandmother made her home at Fox How under the shelter of the fells, with her four daughters, the youngest of whom was only eight when their father died.
A modern girls' school, equipped as scores are now equipped throughout the country, was of course not to be found in 1858, when I first became a school boarder, or in 1867, when I ceased to be one.
It is the rank and file - the average woman - for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly.