The last year of the century ended in triumph, with the spectacular success of the book begun three years earlier, the book that had seemed ‘more impossible every day’. Mary still kept by her the diary in which she had written, twenty-two years earlier, ‘what a great pleasure and interest it would be to me in life to write books’. Now an exhausted Mary was turning down offers from Tillotson's and John Murray, opportunities that would have seemed unimaginable as she worked on Her Evil Genius, wrenching the time from parish visiting and choir practice in Hodnet Church. She had begun life in the year when Darwin's theories were set, as many believed, to tear the Church from its foundations – now, aged forty-one, she herself was at the centre of a religious controversy of sorts, her satire of the Revd Gresley ricocheting around literary London and attracting notice as far away as America.

To those living through them, the last days of a century are a time of uncertainty, but also a time for reminiscence and, inevitably, evaluation of what has gone before. Like her contemporaries, Mary must have spent time in these last weeks of the century reflecting on her life to date, on what she had achieved and what she had missed.