It snowed all day yesterday, then last night apparently rained on top of that, so this morning everything is slick and nasty and dangerous-looking.

The cat is disgusted with winter. He barely sets a paw outside, just glowers and stomps and picks at the furniture, with the clear goal of trying to drive me crazy.

Despite the foul weather, life is sinking back into its usual pattern. After driving P to the bus station, I spent the day washing sheets, changing the guest room back into my study, editing, dealing with emails, and so on and so forth. Today, more editing, and then a midmorning phone call with the curator at the Maine Women Writers Collection about restarting the process of moving my papers into their archive. Before the pandemic I'd had some early conversations with the then-curator about making that move. But then everyone got distracted, the curator changed jobs, I forgot to think about the issue, and thus here we are, starting from the beginning. But I'm glad to be thinking about it again. Women writers in Maine are so fortunate to have an archive that wants to house their work, and I'm pleased to have the chance to make my sons' lives easier, to leave them with less to deal with when the time comes while still making sure they have decision-making power if they want it.

So that conversation is on today's docket, and then grocery shopping and probably some housework, and then making something or other for dinner with the poets tonight.

I'm almost finished with Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. It's a brilliant and sorrowful book, one that I can only read in small bursts. She is almost too intelligent for me; it takes me a while to grasp what she is saying about these books I know so well. I am such a non-intellectual reader. I read and reread and reread; I slip into these books like I slip into my shoes, but I am rarely smart about them. Hardwick, though: she is thoroughly smart, but also, often, filled with pity, admiration, frustration for both authors and characters . . . and those are emotions I can share with her. Here's what she has to say about Jane Carlyle, wife of the Victorian biographer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle:

It is sad to think of Jane Carlyle's last years. Neurasthenia accounted for a lot of her torments in the middle of the night. But she has such gaiety and reasonableness that we are scarcely prepared for the devastation that swept over her as a result of feeling undervalued, put-upon, refused the consolations of a grateful husband. Once when she told Carlyle that she had, at a certain moment, thought of leaving him, he replied, "I don't know that I would have missed you. I was very busy just then with Cromwell." The raging productivity of the Victorians shattered nerves and punctured stomachs, but it was a thing noble, glorious, awesome in itself.

Jane Carlyle's subversive irony and her ambivalence make her the most interesting of the wives we know about in this period. It is very risky to think of her as a failed novelist or as a "sacrificed" writer in some other form. All we can look for are the openings she--and Dorothy Wordsworth, also--came upon, the little alleys for self-display, the routes found that are really a way of dominating the emotional material of daily life. [Hardwick was reading a collection of her letters.] The chanciness of it all, the modesty, the intermittent aspect of the production--there is pathos in that. In the end what strikes one as the greatest personal loss of these private writing careers is that the work could not truly build for the women a bulwark against the sufferings of neglect and the humiliations of lovelessness. The Victorian men, perverse as many of them are, were spared these pinches of inadequacy, faltering confidence, and fears of uselessness.