Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty per cent of useful work of the world.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

Bit by bit . . . she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.