Her income was a pension of £20, from the Royal Bounty Fund; and with this, for all security, she set out, in 1847, with her sister to Edinburgh, determined to make her own way in the literary world. At leaving her native land she says:
"I go as one that comes no more, yet go without regret;
The summers other memories store 'twere summer to forget;
I go without one parting word, one grasp of parting hand,
As to the wide air goes the bird—yet fare thee well, my land!"
She quickly made friends in Edinburgh, won by her genius and character, in the circle which included Christopher North. Her industry was amazing: she wrote essays, reviews, leaders, lyrics, stories—indeed, she wrote anything she was asked to write, and under the pressure of her work her prose strengthened and developed. But all her energy could not make her rich. "The waters of her lot," she says, "were often troubled, though not by angels." Her own health interfered with her work, and, from the beginning, she out of her own poverty tried to relieve that of her mother.
In 1852 she moved to London, and here, by the gift of £100 from the Marquis of Lansdowne, she was for the time released from the pressure of daily necessity. She concentrated on a more important work than she had yet attempted, and wrote a novel which she called "My Share of the World."
It is written in the form of an autobiography of one Frederick Favoursham, a youthful straggler through journalism and tutorship, who wins nothing better, in the end, than a lonely possession of vast estates. But one realises fully, in this story, the strength of a mind whose endeavour is to probe the heart of things, and whose firm incisive expression translates precisely what the mind discovers.
There are in this work, and it is natural it should be so, one or two touches of self-revelation; the only ones, I think, which she, in all her writing, permitted herself. She makes her hero say of his mother—"Well I remember her old blue gown, her hands hard with rough work, het still girlish figure and small pale face, from which the bloom and the prettiness had gone so early; but the hard hand had, in its kindly pressure, the only genuine love I ever knew; the pale face looks yet on my sleep with a blessing, and the old gown has turned, in my dreams, to the radiant robe of an angel."
And the delicate sensitive character of Lucy, the heroine, reads like the expression of the writer's own personality: into it she has put a touch of romance. In all her work there is never a word of personal complaint, but the words she puts into the mouth of her hero, when Lucy commits suicide, must have been born of her own suffering: "When the burden outgrows the strength so far that moral as well as physical energies begin to fail, and there is no door but death's that will welcome our weariness, what remains but to creep into that quiet shelter? I think it had come to that with Lucy. Her days were threatened by a calamity, the most terrible in the list of human ills, which the wise Manetho, the last of the Egyptians, with his brave Pagan heart and large philosophy, thought good and sufficient warrant for a man's resigning his place on the earth."
Among other mental qualities, she had, for the fortification of her spirit, a sense of humour. In this same book she writes of "a little man of that peculiar figure which looks as if a not very well filled sack had somehow got legs;" and commenting on a little difficulty of her hero's making, she says, "It is rather an awkward business to meet a family at breakfast whose only son one has kicked overnight."
And how elastic and untarnished must that nature have been which, after years of continuous struggle for bare subsistence, could put her money-wise people on to paper and quietly say of them that "To keep a daily watch over passing pence did not disturb the Fentons—it was a mental exercise suited to their capacities." The turning of that sentence was surely an exquisite pleasure to its author. And "My Share of the World" is full of cleverly-turned sentences—"Hartley cared for nobody, and I believe the corollary of the miller's song was verified in his favour."
But we must not linger longer over her novel, its pages are full of passages which tell of the vigorous quality of her mind.