My dear Molly I have just received your letter with its proposal to come across the ocean to live with me. The same idea has occurred to other women. Put it out of your very inconsiderate head at once and forever, as they have had to. No woman shall ever live with me again in that sense.
I am a Great Man, living in dignified retirement in a village in a house which I have given to the National Trust to keep as a memorial of my life here with Charlotte and my death in a solitude which let nobody dare to profane. It is kept for me by a treasure of a stern Scottish house keeper who is quite indispensable to me. If you arrived and proposed to settle in for a single night she would leave me instantly; and our devoted Irish Catholic housemaid would follow her and make house uninhabitable. The scandal in the village, the degradation to Literature, the insult to Charlotte’s memory would be such that I should be justified in shooting you if there were no other way of preventing you from crashing my gates.
If you nevertheless try, it will not be necessary to shoot you; but the Irish maid will say “Not at home” ; and you will never see me or hear from me again.