“Happy Beyond the Telling”

Drawing on letters and her Diaries, this chapter treats Edith’s initial years in England. She was “in perfect ecstasy” to be back with Kate, in a life that she would later fictionalize in her unpublished Little Hungria. Soon she was winning prizes for her poetry, and 1902 saw her first novel, Out of the Cypress Swamp. Edith considered Swamp to be “pretty mad & bad stuff—chiefly dash—alas!” but it had good reviews. In hopes of maintaining contact with Manly, she also kept her hand in academically. The year 1901 saw her translation of seven lais by Marie de France and she revised Emaré for the Early English Text Society. She also developed a two-part article, “The Old English Offa Cycle,” that would appear in 1904–1905 in Modern Philology, a journal that Manly had helped found.