Detached from herself, silenced, subdued, this woman artist tried in the beginning, as we shall see, to write like an angel in the house of fiction: with Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, she concealed her own truth behind a decorous and ladylike facade, scattering her real wishes to the winds or translating them into incomprehensible hieroglyphics. But as time passed and her cave-prison became more constricted, more claustrophobic, she "fell" into the gothic/Satanic mode and, with the Brontes and Mary Shelley, she planned mad or monstrous escapes, then dizzily withdrew — with George Eliot and Emily Dickinson — from those open spaces where the scorching presence of the patriarchal sun, whom Dickinson called "the man of noon," emphasized her vulnerability. Since "Creation seemed a mighty Crack" to make her "visible," she took refuge again in the safety of the "dim hypaethric cavern" where she could be alone with herself, with a truth that was hers even in its fragmentation.