Dear me! what an archaic type she already seems, that original “new woman” whom one used to find at the Pioneer Club in its early days.
Perhaps it is as well that Mrs. Lynn Linton did not live to see suffragists concealed in pantechnicon vans for the purpose of raiding Parliament, or shouting down Cabinet Ministers, assaulting policemen, smashing windows, and going to prison in hundreds with as much self-glorification as if they were notorious criminals and heroines of a “Penny Dreadful.” The dictionary surely does not contain words so scathing as the old lady would have required for such flagrant revolters against her ideal of womanhood. That women suffragettes have an ideal she would not have understood. The curt indifference of men to their more peaceable demands has forced women to perpetrate these antics to draw attention to their creed. She was herself a woman who was greatly misunderstood. The conception formed by the public, who knew Mrs. Lynn Linton only by her writings, was entirely different from that of people who were privileged to know her personally. All her venom was in her pen, all her heart in her home and her friends.
I have reason to recall her name with gratitude, for she was one of the first to assist me by helpful advice and example along the slippery path of authorship. Indeed, her readiness to place her long experience at the service of young writers, who were often entirely unknown to her, even at the sacrifice of considerable time and convenience to herself, was one of the most delightful points in her character.
One day, late in the last century, I was chatting with her in her flat eight stories up in Queen Anne’s Mansions, the windows of which looked out high over the neighbouring chimney-pots and far away beyond the grey mist of smoky London to the Surrey hills. Lying on the table was a large bundle of manuscripts, upon which I naturally remarked, “What a lot of work you have there on hand; surely that means two or three new books?”
“Not one page is my own,” she replied, peering at me through her gold-rimmed spectacles. “Bundles of manuscripts like these have haunted my later life. I receive large packets from men and women I have never seen and know nothing whatever about. One asks for my advice; another if I can find a publisher; a third enquires if the material is worth spinning out into a three-volume novel; a fourth lives abroad and places the MS. in my hands to do with it exactly as I think fit.
“How fearful! But what do you do with them all?”
“Once I returned one unread, for the writing was so bad I could not decipher it. But only once; the rest I have always conscientiously read through and corrected page by page, if I have thought there was anything to be made of them. But to many of my unknown correspondents, I have had to reply sadly that the work had not sufficient merit for publication, and, as gently as I could, suggest their leaving literature alone and trying something else.”
“You are very good to bother yourself with them.”
“No, not good exactly; but I feel very strongly the duty of the old to the young, and how the established must help the striving. I am so sorry for young people, and know how a little help or advice given at the right moment may prove the making of a career; kindly words of discouragement, given also at the right time, may save many a bitter tear of disappointment in the future.”
This was the “dragon” who, I do not doubt, existed in the minds of thousands of readers of Mrs. Lynn Linton’s magazine essays—essays which were full of fire; critical, analytical, clear-sighted and written unflinchingly. Who would dream after reading one of her splendidly forcible arguments, written in her trenchant style, that the real author was one of the most domesticated, home-loving women possible, full of kindness and sympathy, and keenly interested in the welfare of all around her? How little a book reveals the true author. How often the pen disguises the real person, as words disguise the inmost thoughts.