I cannot hope that what I have to say will be very interesting to many.

We believed that growth through Local Government, and perhaps through some special machinery for bringing the wishes and influence of women of all classes to bear on Parliament, other than the Parliamentary vote, was the real line of progress.

We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realize all they tell us.

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

... the strictness of to-day may have at any moment to be purchased by the laxity of to-morrow.

I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.