In the various waiting rooms, I pore over Caroline’s letters in digitised archives online, as she takes her personal loss and transmutes it into something greater than her, something heroic, enduring, revolutionary. Her handwriting elegant and legible even on the screen of a phone, the curve of her upper-case I and curlicue on upper-case C; the cups of y’s and g’s that are dropped when she’s writing with haste.

She dreams her husband is dying, attended by two old women who berate her. She dreams an unborn baby has drowned: I saw him float away and no one would attend to me because I was mad! Since they were born, I’ve dreamed of losing my babies too. I dream that I’ve left my daughter in a Left Luggage unit and there are hundreds of dully gleaming lockers and I don’t have a key. I get off a long-haul 93flight and my phone starts ringing: my husband, thousands of miles away, is asking where on earth I am and in the background the baby’s crying, desperate for me, and it’s too late to undo what I’ve done. I am dying, and I’m scared, and they tell me to keep calm and hold the hands that reach out for me, and I do, and feel myself pulled from my body. A moment’s relief, then the agony of realising I will never hold my children again. I beg for one last chance and am let sink back into my body, sore and clumsy, and I take my boy into my lap and hold him tight, the smooth warm curve of his back, and know that this is all that matters, ever, ever, ever.

Caroline, without her boys – her Penny, her abandoned chicken Brin, her Too-too the little tadpole – stays awake all night long, night after night, staring into the dark, until visions of their large brown eyes swim up, as when I looked up from my work and found them watching.

She would be annoyed with them, then, for interrupting her; for breaking the spell. She writes – has always written – to survive. Her first novel paid for the birth of her son – the doctor’s bills and the nurses. She accedes to her publisher’s demand and writes a bijou almanac designed for the Christmas market: an inch and a half wide and sold with its own miniature eyeglass. She tries her hand at plays; she’ll turn her pen to anything. She always has and has always had to, children or no.

She tests out guilt and refuses to feel guilty. Refuses shame too: there is too much fear of publishing about women, she writes. It is reckoned that they wish nothing 94better than to hide themselves away and say no more about it. No longer! she writes. She will tell her truth, and she will change the world.