“I have a new plan, Mr. Johnson,” I said, perching on the edge of my seat. “To live entirely by my pen.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but I wasn’t done. The speech had taken shape in my mind all the way from Ireland, or maybe the whole last year of my life, if not all my years. And this, my one chance to say it.

“I must be independent. It is the project of my life. I wasn’t born to tread the beaten track—it’s the peculiar bent of my nature. And I know your sex generally laugh at female determination, but I never resolved to do anything of consequence that I didn’t adhere to resolutely, improbable as it might have seemed.”

He sat back and considered me, folding his slender hands into a perfect steeple.

“First, I am known for not being the most accurate representative of ‘my sex.’ I am asthmatic and short, with a weakness for chintz. But I will say that nothing about you seems improbable, Miss Wollstonecraft. Still, how will you do it?”

I opened the haversack on my lap and pulled out my hastily tied manuscript, unrolled it, tried to straighten the pages, and set it on the desk between us, though there was scarcely space for it.

“I’ve written a novel. About a woman. Named Mary.”

“What a surprise,” he said, taking it in his hands. “Not a wedding bells plot, I presume?”

“I’d say not. She is … a sort of genius.”

“Ah, so more Reason than Sensibility.”

“No! An exquisite sensibility, which is the fruit of her genius, or the seed of it. Not the derivative, prescriptive, imitative, affected, but the freshly seen—originality, independence, spontaneity, the natural, innovative, imaginative, and real, true feeling felt firsthand!”

“All that, in this?” he said, riffling the pages. “Does she marry at all?”

“Yes. But unhappily.”

“Of course. Live or die?”

“I do not strive for happy endings,” I said.

“So dies then.”

“But free. To love whom she chooses, in Heaven. For all eternity.”

He cleared his throat. “Heaven is fine, but I am more for what happens here on earth.”

“But will you at least read it?”

“I will, but I don’t need to. I’ll give you ten pounds for it.” He paused while I collected my jaw from the floor. “But keep in mind that a woman writing for her living must think what will make money … on a continuing basis.”

I felt my shoulders sag and a corner of the blanket fall away. “I don’t know what will make money. I suppose that is the flaw in my plan.”

“Already with the gloom?”

“I do have a tendency to despair and vexations.”

“Well, banish them. Will you write reviews? Translations?”

“I think I can.”

“What are your languages?”