“Well, I like it. We’ll come out with it first; our readers will eat up its piety and virtue, and then we’ll hit them with your novel—the radical Wollstonecraft!”

What happiness was mine, daughter! If not writing, you’d find me walking through a gritty London fast becoming my city. I stalked the Thames daily, past the bustling waterfront, ships jammed in like stacked logs. I dressed simply, hair down my back; in cool weather my beaver hat, in warm my straw. If I was an oddity, no one cared. I’d begun to earn more money with less trouble, felt in better health than I’d enjoyed in so long—no headaches, stomach troubles, monthlong bouts of despair. I breathed in the fragrant spring, content, as if I’d found my soul again. Fanny was still with me, every day, but her loss no longer skewered me.

Each day at five o’clock I’d walk to Johnson’s house for dinner, a daily pilgrimage along Great Surrey Street past Albion Mills, up to the start of Blackfriars—as if a bridge from my old life to my new—with its solid brick arches and girders under my feet, and a view of all London, from Westminster downstream to Billingsgate, and everything in between, the gilded dome of St. Paul’s floating above it all.

I’d arrive, exhilarated from my walk, at Johnson’s upstairs dining room to find a world unto itself, and the one I took most pleasure in. The dinners were neither vast nor elaborate, no drawing room drinks before or after, nor a display of courses, but everything on the table all at once, with instructions to help ourselves. The food was simple: variations of boiled cod, roast veal or beef, potatoes, vegetables, and rice pudding, in some rotating order, but the wine was extravagant, and the company always rich. Here was my old mentor Price, when he felt up to it, my friend Hewlett. Another night, John Bonnycastle, who wrote math and science books for the common reader. Another, William Blake, desperate for whatever engraving jobs Johnson threw his way, including my own children’s book. Here, William Cowper, a sad young poet who needed loans to live on. Over there the naturalist Erasmus Darwin. They were high-minded and silver-tongued, believed ideas could change the world, and, like Hewlett, that reason would lead to the perfectibility of the human species.