June 22, 1896.
My dear Will,
If The Washer of the Ford were the first of Fiona’s books I am confident that the sex of its author would not pass unchallenged. A great part of it is essentially masculine—all the “Seanachas,” and “The Annir Choille,” and the opening of “The Washer”: not impossible for a woman to write, but unlikely. Nor would a woman have written “The Annir Choille,” I think, as it is written here. Fiona has shown her double sex in this story more completely, it seems to me, than in any other. It is written with a man’s sense of decency and a woman’s sense of delicacy—and the love of both man and woman is in it to a very extraordinary degree. The fighting stories seem to me to be pure man—though I suppose that there are Highland women (like Scott’s “Highland Widow”) capable of their stern savagery. But on these alone, Fiona’s sex scarcely could have been accepted unchallenged. But what seems to me to show plainest, in all the stories together, is not the trifle that they are by a man or by a woman but that they have come out of your inspired soul. They seem to be the result of some outside force constraining you to write them. And with their freshness they have a curious primordial flavour—that comes, I suppose, from the deep roots and full essences of life which are their substance of soul. Being basic, elementary, they are independent of time; or even race. In a literary—technically literary—way they seem to me to be quite your most perfect work. I am sensitive to word arrangement, and some of your work has made me rather disposed to swear at you for carelessness. You have not always taken the trouble to hunt for the word that you needed. But these stories are as nearly perfect in finish, I think, as literary endeavour can make them. And they have that effect of flow and ease that can only come—at least, I can imagine it only as arriving—from the most persistent and laborious care. In the detail of make-up, I am especially impressed by the insertion of the Shadow Seers just where the key is changed radically. They are at once your justifying pieces for what has gone before, and an orchestral interlude before the wholly different Seanachas begin. Of all in the book, my strongest affection is for “The Last Supper.” It seems to me to be the most purely beautiful, and the profoundest thing that you have done.
I feel that some strong new current must have come into your life; or that the normal current has been in some way obstructed or diverted—for the animating spirit of these new books reflects a radical change in your own soul. The Pagan element is entirely subordinated to and controlled by the inner passions of the soul. In a word you have lifted your work from the flesh-level to the soul-level....
What you say in your letter of worry and ill-health saddens me. It is unjust that your rare power of creation should be hampered in any way. But it seems to me that there must be great consolation in your certain knowledge that you have greatly created, in spite of all.
Always affectionately yours,
T. A. J.