The Joys of Being a Woman, and Other Papers by Winifred Margaretta Kirkland

We are each launched in life with an elfin shipmate—set jogging upon earth beside a fairy comrade. When our ears are clear, he pipes magic music; when our feet are free he pleads with us to follow him on witching paths. We cannot often hear, we cannot often follow, but when we do, we know him for what he is; when we sail or run or fly with him, we know him for the gladdest fellow with whom life ever paired us, a companion rarely glimpsed, but glorious, for he is our own true Self. Poets and dreamers have sometimes snared him in a sonnet, but for the most part, for his waggishness and his wanderings, he demands, not the strait-jacketing of poetry, but the flexible garment of prose. It is the shifting subtleties of the essay that have ever best expressed him.