Page:Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Pennell, 1885).djvu/212

196 "Ours was not an idle happiness, a paradise of selfish and transitory pleasures," Godwin asserts in referring to the months of their married life. Mary never let her work come to a standstill. Idleness was a failing unknown to her; nor had marriage, as has been seen, lessened the necessity of industry. Indeed, it was now especially important that she should exert her powers of working to the utmost, which is probably the reason that little remains to show as product of this period. Reviewing and translating were still more profitable, because more certain, than original writing; and her notes to Godwin prove by their allusions that Johnson continued to keep her supplied with employment of this kind. She had several larger schemes afoot, for the accomplishment of which nothing was wanting but time. But her chief literary enterprise during the last year of her life was her story of Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman. Her interest in it as an almost personal narrative, and her desire to make it a really good novel, were so great that she wrote and re-wrote parts of it many times. She devoted more hours to it than would be supposed possible, judging from the rapidity with which her other books were produced.