Seeing the ship hove down like that was as if I’d seen a vision of our future (or my own) having been dashed on the rocks and adrift at sea, now run aground. It made me redouble my commitment to her restoration, if not Imlay’s and mine. But when we settled at our inn, I was disappointed to find no letter from him. My being there was a chance, but a year before he would have taken it. Each time the post arrived and there was nothing from him was a fresh abandonment. Where was the man who’d been alive to our shared feelings, to imagination, our deepest principles—alive to touch, to kisses, beating hearts, and bodies in flight? If only he were here with me, this romantic country, these fine summer evenings, wouldn’t it turn his heart away from the coarseness that hardened it? I felt his absence as wrenching physical pain, and wondered what my existence was without him, without my daughter, without anyone.

My letters were alternately plaintive, pleading, or proud. I was the abandoned woman, an exile pleading for return. I wanted to awaken his feeling, if not his guilt at having treated me unjustly. I berated him and enumerated his faults. But each time I posted a letter, I berated myself. How far had I fallen from the “Wollstonecraft” who’d argued against the victimization of women, the sort glorified in the novels I hated, capable of nothing but raw emotion—objects of male desire but never the subject of their own lives. All sensibility, no sense. Had I become the very woman I’d railed against?

Then something else began to stir inside me. On the morning I was to leave for Norway alone, a dish of coffee and crisp linen revived my spirits. Backman warned me that the roads were notoriously rocky and slow, so I determined to go by sea. The coast was known to be dangerous too, with rocks lurking just below the surface of the water, but it seemed the better means. The air was pure and balmy, producing the most voluptuous sensations. I wrapped my greatcoat around me and lay down on some sails at the bottom of the small boat I’d hired, its motion rocking me as we went. I crossed my arms under my head to watch the gray morning bloom with purple clouds, then gold, then pass to silvery white. How often had I felt myself a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind, all alone, and then something sublime and beautiful dilated my emotions to make me feel that I was still part of a mighty whole.

The clouds came into my vision, drifted across and away. But I didn’t want to keep them. Why would I?

I was the sky.