I make sure that I write to the king almost daily: bright and cheerful letters in which I praise his valor and courage and ask him for reports of the siege of Boulogne, and tell him that I am certain it must fall soon. I tell him that the children are well and that they miss him, as I do. I write to him as if I were a loving wife, a little heart-sore to be without him, but proud of the courage of her husband, as a great general’s wife should be. It is easy for me to write convincingly. I have discovered that I have a talent for writing, a love of writing.

My book of psalms, beautifully bound, is tucked deep in my locked box of books. I think of it as my treasure, my greatest treasure, one that I have to keep secret. But seeing those words that were first written, and scratched out, and rewritten again in print and bound into a book, I know that I love the process of writing and publishing. To take a thought and work on it, to render it into the clearest form possible, and then to send it out into the world—this is work so precious and so joyful that I am not surprised that men have kept it to themselves.

So now I practice my letter writing to my husband. I compose it as I would translate a psalm, by imagining the state of mind of the author that I want to be. When I am writing a translation of a prayer, I always imagine the first author—a man miserably conscious of his own sin. I think myself into his mind and then I write the most beautiful sonorous version of what I think might come from his mouth. Then I bring myself into the work, powerfully aware that I am a woman, not a man. The sins that grieve a man are often those of pride, or greed, or a lust for power for its own sake. But these are not the sins of a woman, I think. These are not my first sins. My worst sin is a failure of obedience: I find it so hard to bend my will. My other great fault is a passion: an adoration as if I were setting up an idol, a false God.