“You do not say if you want Miss ——’s most interesting letter back. Never mind what she says about people writing together. We have proved that we can do it, and we shall go on. The reason few people can, is because they have separate minds upon most subjects, and fight their own hands all the time. I think the two Shockers have a very strange belief in each other, joined to a critical faculty; added to which, writing together is, to me at least, one of the greatest pleasures I have. To write with you doubles the triumph and the enjoyment, having first halved the trouble and anxiety.”
On January 3rd, 1888, we had finished the first half of “An Irish Cousin.”
I find in my diary: “A few last revisionary scratches at the poor Shocker, and so farewell for the present. Gave it to mother to read. She loathes it.”
All through the spring months we wrote and rewrote, and clean-copied, and cast away the clean copies illegible from corrections. Intermittently, and as we could, we wrote on, and in Martin’s diary I find a quotation from an old part-song that expressed the general attitude towards us:
“Thus flies the dolphin from the shark,
And the stag before the hounds.”
Martin and I were the dolphin and the stag. As a propitiatory measure the Shocker was read aloud at intervals, but with no great success. Our families declined to take us seriously, but none the less offered criticisms, incessant, and mutually destructive. In connection with this point, and as a warning to other beginners, I will offer a few quotations from letters of this period.
E. Œ. S. to V. F. M. (Spring, 1888.)
“Minnie says you are too refined, and too anxious not to have anything in our book that was ever in anyone else’s book. Mother, on the other hand, complained bitterly of the want of love interest. Minnie defended us, and told her that there was now plenty of love in it. To which Mother, who had not then read the proposal, replied with infinite scorn, ‘only squeezing her hand, my dear!’ She went on to say that she ‘liked improprieties.’ I assured her I had urged you in vain to permit such, and she declared that you were quite wrong, and when I suggested the comments of The Family, she loudly deplored the fact of our writing being known, ignoring the fact that she has herself blazoned it to the ends of the earth and to Aunt X.”
Following on this, a protest is recorded from another relative, on the use of the expression “he ran as if the devil were after him,” but the letter ends with a reassuring postscript.
“Mother has just said that she thought Chapter IX excellent, ‘most fiery love’; though she said it had rather taken her by surprise, as she ‘had not noticed a stream of love leading up to it—only jealousy.’”