They were happy. He encouraged her writing (poetry and novels) in which she expressed her politically radical sympathies. He died in 1807.
Her didactic purpose in her writings was less obvious to her contemporaries, than to us. Her final novel Detraction Displayed (1828) has the thinnest narrative to convey sentiments like this we quote:
• By cat-like, I mean having the cat's propensity to give a coup de patte, a sudden stroke of the paw, when the creature seems in perfect amity with one, and in harmless play. The nickname of cats is, I know, exclusively given to that much-injured body of women called " old maids," but I do not see the peculiar justice of the appellation as applied to them. On the contrary, according to my definition of the term cat, it applies to all young men and women married or single, as well as to the old of both sexes, who from a sort of treacherous impulse take pleasure in saying something wounding to one's feelings, and mortifying to one's self-love, whether it regards one's self or those in whom we are interested; and who, even in moments of unsuspecting good will, by the utterance of some sudden sarcasm at the commencement perhaps of a friendly intercourse, convert the social feeling into one of conscious injury, and occasion a wound which rankles in the bosom of the injured, during the rest of the meeting. Oh! there are many cats in the world! and I have seen even youth and beauty become, suddenly offensive to my sight, by the expression of malevolent pleasure at having given, catlike, a coup de patte, which had inflicted a wound on the sensitive nature of an unoffending companion.
This passage demonstrates a graceful writer, an observant writer. Our times, equally as oblivious to some things as hers was to other, find the bald presentation of such sentiments unsubtle.
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