There are people like our mother, and possibly you—indeed, I think definitely you—who are naturals at life. They understand and are at ease with the way things work. I don’t understand the mechanism, Tilde. I am not properly in tune with the requirements. I don’t have a natural affinity for anything. Not motherhood, not wifehood, not poetry. I probably would have been better off living in a century where women did not even learn to read. Perhaps I could have been happy brewing beer and fermenting goat’s milk, had I not known differently.

Again and again, I see the same pattern emerge in myself: grand ideas, furious bouts of creativity, and then, a slow painful realisation. I look at the products of my efforts and see they are too small, too fragile to survive in the world. I see that the world will not want them. There is nothing grand or exciting about them at all: they are simply not interesting to anyone but me.

This realisation makes it very hard to work. It makes it very hard to believe in what I produce or see any merit in working to improve or perfect or refine. I cannot make head nor tail of The Poems of Veda Gray anymore. Working on it is fresh agony every day. All the solutions I come up with in the morning have created new problems by afternoon. I can’t see clearly. I keep putting in words and taking them out again, and before I know it, a whole day is gone.

If only there was someone here to talk to. I thrash around by myself, getting nowhere.

The quality I really lack, Tilde, is humility. I had all sorts of opportunity to learn it throughout my girlhood—from our mother, from you, from women about us in church and at school, from other girls and teachers. It was one thing to be accomplished, but another entirely to make a song and dance out of it, as I did. Accomplishments are not things to greedily hold onto and turn into ambitions. That is where I went wrong.

Now I understand why girls are taught humility, modesty. It’s not just to make us the quiet helpmates of others, it’s to prepare us for our expectations of the world. It’s to make us accept our fates.

No one liked Emma Bovary. Did you?