Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order. Theresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes, in this nineteenth year of our blessed union.

Instal Middlemarch free