The Fall of the House of Wilde by Emer O'Sullivan

described her mind as ‘a portal open to all points of the compass to receive influences’. 7 Being largely self-educated, she avoided the gender conditioning and limitations a school curriculum typically confers.
    Jane wrote an article for the
Nation
in 1847 advocating toil as a vocation and
raison d’être
. ‘Work is holy,’ she declared. She planned her own day to allow for the minimum of distractions. Though her work would not begin until 11 a.m. – as she admitted in an undated letter to a friend, John Hilson – if there were no callers she continued reading until lapsing into sleep around 2 or 3 a.m. She dressed for comfort, in a loose peignoir. What she had to show for all this labour disappointed her. In response to compliments from Hilson, she pronounced herself ‘no divine Priestess after all – merely a lamp-holder in the Court of the Gentiles’. He was wrong to name her ‘a professed Literateur’. ‘By no means my friend am I one – merely a proselyte at the gate.’ 8
    In late 1847 Jane visited Scotland. We know little about her visit other than she became attracted to John Hilson, a Scottish merchant and man of letters, and developed, as she put it, ‘a monomania on the subject of Scotch perfections’. Her visit was followed by an epistolary flirtation, at least on Jane’s side. She never met Hilson again. The correspondence continued, but as the years passed it dwindled. Many of the letters are undated, and most were sent between 1847 and 1851. The last letter from Hilson that Jane refers to came in 1875, when he wrote to her of the death of his daughter. Nothing, however, remains of Hilson’s letters to allow us to interpret the relationship from his perspective.
    Hilson was a man of strong convictions who was concerned with politics and dabbled in socialist thought – he revered Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. However, Hilson’s letters arrived a lot less often than Jane wished. ‘Do for Heaven’s sake write on the back of an invoice – on a receipt – anything rather than you shrouding yourself like a Hindoo Deity in this vast formless silence with your finger on your lip for a series of ages.’ Equally unwelcome was Hilson’s puritanism. No matter: Jane flaunted her liberal tastes, her ‘passion for fine acting’, telling Hilson she attended the theatre every night, knowing Hilson was ‘puritan enough to be shocked at this’. She shared with him her impatience with the dull-witted among whom she circulated, and spoke of ‘the grand gatherings of the Soulless where they polka and eat’, and where her talk turned heads, ‘for it is singular how these dumb souls like to listen’.
    On other occasions she tried to taunt him with a descriptive picture of herself dressed for a ball in ‘black lace trimmed with bunches of gold wheat – on the head a small mantilla of black lace fastened with gold wheat to correspond’. She knew her frivolity would grate – ‘How I like to drag people down to my level when I am not in soaring mood’ – and assumed his ‘upper lip curled now worse than Byron’s’. She continued, ‘so here is the earnest Gurth [Hilson’s pen name] with his Carlyle congue [
sic
] and Emersonian eyes obliged to attend to my toilette . . . Now I know you are looking dreadfully scornful.’ 9 If only they could meet again, she would charm him, or so she hoped.
    Jane had managed to keep her identity under wraps since she began writing for the
Nation
. But disguise could only be temporary in a society as small and gossipy as Dublin. She consented to a visit from the editor, Charles Gavan Duffy, who had been trying to find out the identity of ‘John Fanshawe Ellis’. Duffy called at her home in Lesson Street in the summer of 1846. Writing his memoirs almost half a