A Man of Genius Read Online Free PDF

‘Don’t say that, Miss Ann. She cares in her way. She gives you masters to make you a lady too.’
    â€˜Too?’ gasped young Ann into Martha’s linsey-woolsey breast. ‘I won’t be a lady. I won’t be like her.’
    Children say that kind of thing. They make absolute statements and think they can conform to them. They don’t know they’re already formed.
    Then Martha, warm, ample, beloved Martha, who’d sewn her clothes and dampened her sobs in her early years, Martha who’d crept up the stairs with a bowl of buttered bread in hot milk for the older dry-eyed child shut in the attic, remembering to avoid the stair that would creak and give her away to her mistress, this dear Martha went to look after a sick sister, whose husband had just been killed at sea near Barbados by the French.
    Caroline let her go without a murmur.
    So, when Ann met some sectarians on the wooden Putney bridge, she joined them. Just like that. Despite the shadowy clerical past, there’d never been much religion in Caroline’s house; one god seemed as good as another to her daughter. She was eighteen now.
    William Bates, the founder, was a man of the inner spirit, a Quaker originally but wanting something even less constrained than Quakerism. He’d inherited money and a house with a little land and a well-stocked library in the village of Fen Ditton near Cambridge by flat marshy fields. There, with his friend Jeremiah Ellison, he would form a community of equal beings, to join in prayer in each one’s own way, study, work together and share everything. Each would do what he or she could and expect the same of others. They would be vegetarians. Betty, ten years older than Ann, had also joined, along with three other men.
    Caroline snorted as Ann packed her bags with her few clothes and books. She would be rid of the burden of supporting the girl. What had been the use of the Italian lessons from Signor Moretti and the music from a dismal harpist who hated teaching, when Ann had a character so contrary?
    Wanting no made-up tales of elopement or disgrace to entertain the Mrs Graves and Pugh, Ann told Caroline her purpose.
    Her mother raised her drooping lids: her greenish eyes sparkled as they did whenever she was in a passion. Ann would learn soon enough that men and women might be equal in theory, oh yes, but there were ways in which they weren’t and never would be. She shuddered to mention their power. She closed her eyes against the thought.
    Sexual congress, Ann supposed, having learned a good deal from the letters section of the Lady’s Magazine . Much her mother would know of that!
    Ann was too big to be slapped and too unschooled to argue. She left Putney, treading the bridge’s wooden planks, not looking back even once.
    Yet she took a precaution. The office in the Strand where Caroline went on her annual visit was the anchor of the Putney house. As she moved through her separated years she told them of her whereabouts. In case.
    The community lasted longer than anyone outside, and perhaps inside, expected.
    â€˜We will work four hours a day,’ William Bates said. ‘That should take care of our needs. We will sell the excess farm produce and sew rough clothes to make an income. The rest of the time we will pray, read, discuss, explore our inner selves and commune with nature.’
    Ann’s enthusiasm waned as she found the housework, the cooking of so many root vegetables, the organising of communal linen, becoming women’s work despite the talk. They had outside help for washdays and harvesting, but there were divisions of labour, and not to her advantage. William Bates was attuned to the flat land for he’d been raised nearby. He loved the earthy fare of turnips, swedes, beetrootand parsnips grown on his own fields. But on dark days Ann looked bleakly at the sodden low-lying ground; she even yearned for the suet puddings and lamb stews of