The Master

He had no memory of when he first knew she was dying. Certainly, that summer there was no intimation of any illness.

He remembered that some time later his mother had mentioned Mi

Their group met once more in his parents’ parlour in Quincy Street near the end of the following year; he recalled how surprising it was to find that Mi

He sat on his terrace now thousands of miles away and many years later. As the crescent moon appeared, he studied its strange, thin, implacable beauty, and sighed as he remembered William coming into his room with the news that Mi

He tried to think when John Gray had told him first of Mi

He asked himself if the intensity of her personality, and the sheer originality of her ambitions, placed against the dullness and banality and penury which surrounded her, might have unsettled her will to live. He felt this especially when her sisters married for security rather than love, and when Mi

It was clear that she was ill, and so apparent to them both that she would not recover that they did not mention it. Nonetheless, as he was leaving her, he asked her how she was sleeping.

‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘Oh, I don’t sleep. I’ve given it up.’

But then she laughed bravely and freely and her smile to him was carefully arranged so that there was nothing hollow or false about it. And then she left him.

IN ENGLAND when he came to visit Mrs Lewes on a Sunday afternoon at North Bank, having secured admission through the intervention of a family friend, he imagined Mi

MINNY DIED in March, a year after he had last seen her. He was still in England. He felt it as the end of his youth, knowing that death, at the last, was dreadful to her. She would have given anything to live. In the years that followed, he longed to know what she would have thought of his books and stories, and of the decisions he made about his life. This sense of missing her deep and demanding response made itself felt to Gray and Holmes as well, and also to William. All of them wondered in their nervous ambition and great, agitated egotism what Mi

It was not true to say that Mi

Soon after she died he wrote a story, ‘Travelling Companions’, in which William, travelling in Italy from Germany, met her by chance in Milan Cathedral, having seen her first in front of Leonardo’s The Last Supper. He loved describing her white umbrella with a violet lining and the sense of intelligent pleasure in her movements, her glance and her voice. He could control her destiny now that she was dead, offer her the experiences she would have wanted, and provide drama for a life which had been so cruelly shortened. He wondered if this had happened to other writers who came before him, if Hawthorne or George Eliot had written to make the dead come back to life, had worked all day and all night, like a magician or an alchemist, defying fate and time and all the implacable elements to re-create a sacred life.

He could not stop wondering how she would have lived, what she would have done. With Alice, the question of Mi