‘thus distracted, thus puzzling even to herself’, Mary could not always ‘follow the rapidity of her changes and the alternate reason and unreason of her moods’. (It is interesting to me that Woolf finds her way to some understanding of Imlay, when condemning him is a much more common reaction.) The difficulty for me in watching Mary’s relationship collapse is seeing her self-regard buckle so completely that she attempts suicide twice in a year. But when, like Plath’s Lady Lazarus, the worms have been picked off her like sticky pearls, Mary does find whatever she needed to find to begin again. She will make a book out of the letters she sent him so as to ‘protect and provide for my child’.