Ours was not an idle happiness, a paradise of selfish and transitory pleasures.  It is perhaps scarcely necessary to mention, that, influenced by the ideas I had long entertained upon the subject of cohabitation, I engaged an apartment, about twenty doors from our house in the Polygon, Somers Town, which I designed for the purpose of my study and literary occupations.  Trifles however will be interesting to some readers, when they relate to the last period of the life of such a person as Mary.  I will add therefore, that we were both of us of opinion, that it was possible for two persons to be too uniformly in each other’s society.  Influenced by that opinion, it was my practice to repair to the apartment I have mentioned as soon as I rose, and frequently not to make my appearance in the Polygon, till the hour of dinner.  We agreed in condemning the notion, prevalent in many situations in life, that a man and his wife cannot visit in mixed society, but in company with each other; and we rather sought occasions of deviating from, than of complying with, this rule.  By these means, though, for the most part, we spent the latter half of each day in one another’s society, yet we were in no danger of satiety.  We seemed to combine, in a considerable degree, the novelty and lively sensation of visit, with the more delicious and heart-felt pleasures of domestic life.

Whatever may be thought, in other respects, of the plan we laid down to ourselves, we probably derived a real advantage from it, as to the constancy and uninterruptedness of our literary pursuits.  Mary had a variety of projects of this sort, for the exercise of her talents, and the benefit of society; and, if she had lived, I believe the world would have had very little reason to complain of any remission of her industry.  One of her projects, which has been already mentioned, was of a series of Letters on the Management of Infants.  Though she had been for some time digesting her ideas on this subject with a view to the press, I have found comparatively nothing that she had committed to paper respecting it.  Another project, of longer standing, was of a series of books for the instruction of children.  A fragment she left in execution of this project, is inserted in her Posthumous Works.

But the principal work, in which she was engaged for more than twelve months before her decease, was a novel, entitled, The Wrongs of Woman.  I shall not stop here to explain the nature of the work, as so much of it as was already written, is now given to the public.  I shall only observe that, impressed, as she could not fail to be, with the consciousness of her talents, she was desirous, in this instance, that they should effect what they were capable of effecting.  She was sensible how arduous a task it is to produce a truly excellent novel; and she roused her faculties to grapple with it.  All her other works were produced with a rapidity, that did not give her powers time fully to expand.  But this