Mary Jary Gurney

“ When the full measure of my grief had exhausted itself, I arose a new being.
From that moment I was myself. I had driven every hope, every feeling from my heart. I had received from his lips the last sacrifice a man can offer to the woman he loves—the abnegation of himself for her happiness; and I declare before Heaven that it was my resolve to do what I thought right, though it cost me my life; for I had nothing now to live for.
I had long followed blindly a passion that brought me to the verge of social destruction. ”

“ My head, my heart, every instinct of my being, approved his words, his looks, his actions.
He had saved me. He, as I knew him in that hour, was my strength; through him I conquered myself. I was strong in that final trial, as a woman only can be strong—through the soul and heart of the man who stands steadfast to himself and to her to the bitter end.
He said: Even in this hour, when every hope and joy of life have sunk away into eternal despair beneath your words, I can be true to my sense of right; I believe life requires no sacrifice ”

“ The artificial being they had created of me was strong enough to assert itself and to sacrifice the love that lay in my heart’s depths—but not till the last moment. It was only upon the very brink of my husband’s return, that, arousing myself from the brief dream of happiness into which, secure in his absence, I had weakly fallen, I could summon the energy to take the draught of agony which, I believed, the hand of duty had prepared for me. ”

“ It is a power present always in the world, which, recognized by two like natures, thenceforth binds them to each other, beyond the control, and in violation, if need be, of any other law—as my mother’s love bound her to my father, and my father’s love bound him to her, and gave me my being—a being cradled in the tenderest, truest passion that ever existed between two human beings.
How long have I been in ascertaining and yielding myself up to this divine law! What wasted years! What subjections derogatory [Pg 15] to the vilest nature! What hypocrisy, dishonoring to God! ”

“ The whole scope and measure of a woman’s heart and brain, and the whole purpose of her being, is love; and her whole knowledge forces itself into one inquiry: Am I worthy of the love of him I love? And does he love me? But I have thought over all this social matter, and have asked myself if I could have loved him better if he had not been what he was—if he had been a member of Parliament? Well, they had been plenty in our family—there were, among the rest, uncle Hudson, and cousin Charles, and cousin Edward Buxton, and cousin Priscilla’s husband ”

“ It is over now! My life is over. My lot is hopeless, endless misery. I accept it for your sake—for the memory of our love.
Then my life, my very soul, met his in one long kiss of agony, and we parted, as I believed, forever.
I had conquered my life; this social law had achieved its triumph.
When my husband reached home I was strong to do the last duty which my position imposed upon me. I knew well that, cost what it would, this must also be done. I must live the life, to which I was bound, [Pg 43] openly. I went to him and told him of my love, of my resolution, and of our separation. ”

“ Hugo alive, I knew well, would not be a praying banker, but abroad in the free air, adventuring crusades, simply and naturally, in whatever way the time demanded, just as the man I love, simply and naturally, and yet so irresistibly, rescued the sepulchre of [Pg 33] my buried hopes and desires, against the law and the power, the ignorance and the infidelity to human nature, of all around me. All things great are simple. In the crusades my ancestors adventured, they went a long way across the world. It was as far as the distance between groom and lady, but not further. ”

“ Our lives express them more clearly than words. He spoke of the false relation which he had gradually been led to assume, and into the continuance of which our passion had held him day by day.
I knew well, he said, it should long ago have been terminated; but I knew not then, as now, the controlling power that has kept me by you until this hour. I believed, first, [Pg 42] that I might love you, and that you might remain forever unconscious of my love. And so I lived till this was impossible. And then my life became one eternal delay of hope, enduring all to this last measure of despair. ”

“ Vigor of body, of mind, passions, desires, reason, all that goes to make up a human soul, were in the full tide of existence; and I was here surely not to contemplate death, but to fulfil the functions of life—of a new life. ”

“ My justification it would be needful to make before a much wider tribunal, for I have perpetrated an act which the whole conventional world have leagued together, in ignorance, prejudice and hypocrisy, to denominate a crime, and I could expect little or no sympathy from that wide bar of public judgment that knows nothing of me nor of my surroundings, and which never could be made to comprehend my nature ”

“ Into their homes they should introduce harem espionage, that the bodily instincts, which they hold in enforced compliance, may never have an opportunity to assert the truth about themselves.
Heresy and adultery, the two excommunicative words, which social life suspends over the doomed head of a woman who thinks and acts contrary to its rules of action, have not that full power and effect they are supposed to have. Nothing but actual physical imprisonment of the body, and, if it were possible, of the mind, can prevent a woman from becoming the secret avower of her belief and of her instincts. ”

“ Shall the right I have asserted to live apart from my husband be followed by cutting off every desire, by marring or concealing every beauty, by devoting the remainder of a life, already cursed by an involuntary indiscretion of youth, to asceticism, [Pg 51] and so continue in another form the struggle against nature to the end?—or accept the creed of the man I love, and seek also my highest happiness in the gratification of that love, which every instinct of my being approves? ”

“ When will narrow-minded, bigoted men learn that the one absolute, controlling law of a woman’s nature is love—that it is the only good and desirable thing about a woman—the only reliable thing about her? They can trust her, with her love, to live in a house of prostitution ”

“ We must part forever. I could repeat again the phrases of social life: There can be no honorable recognition of our love—its open avowal will bring disgrace to my husband and odium upon my children.
And how did he reply to me? Shall I [Pg 40] confess, even there, in that hour of my strength, my utter weakness! I longed for a pleading word. One look of tenderness, and I should have fallen at his feet a ruined being, but ruined in the acknowledgment and utter abandon of my love. ”

“ I had learned these lessons from a parent’s lips. The example of my own true-hearted mother had taught me this. My own life had been given me in violation of society’s teachings.
Noble-hearted woman! who could say (I their child, and the only one that blessed at last their union, nearly a year old then:) Richard Gurney, I have withholden from you nothing; I have sacrificed all at the altar of love—even my little Marian—yet I ask no formal bond of union in return; I care not [Pg 18] for it. ”

“ The excommunicative words do not restrain from either offence; they only develop that unquestionable vice of woman’s weakness, hypocrisy.
The brain, when infidel, is infidel by its own proper organization, and they who assail its infidelity strike vainly at the God who made it, and implanted it in every newborn soul; the body, when infidel to the connection in which it is placed, is so by its [Pg 14] own proper instincts, and they, who attempt to control it, strike, likewise, at a law of its creation. ”

“ He who was in reality of kindred blood, and made for me—for me—whom they paid court to, not because of the instinct of that blood, but because of the narrow thrift of my kinsmen.
But enough of this. I might have spared myself the contempt that tingles through my veins.
I loved him, E * * *; that was all. He became all I did, all I said, my very life. If [Pg 20] I say more I may err, for I truly know no more, and shall never know more than this. ”

“ The Gurney Family is known wherever on the Eastern or Western continent, philanthropy, charity, liberality in its most comprehensive meaning, scholarship and literary ability of the highest order, or wealth in the most profuse exuberance, becomes the theme of the social circle or the text of the author’s pen. ”

“ Pelham or any other individual being.
True men are not such. A woman’s instincts repel such forms of men. You may dress the real as meanly as an American slave, or you may elaborate the attire of the counterfeit to the antipodes of this—to pontifical robes—and the living soul of a woman will never fail to distinguish the false from the true. ”

“ In presenting to the world the extraordinary document which follows, the Publisher deems it fit, by way of Preface, to advert briefly to the principal circumstances and persons connected with this great outrage, which it embodies, upon the sensibilities and morals of the public—distinctly repudiating, himself, any endorsement of the views of the misguided writer, and deeply regretting the scandal which has attached in consequence of her acts to the influential Society of Friends, and to the numerous high families, with which she is allied, both in England and America. ”

“ Should I, I ask you, have preferred the reputation which the world accords to her who, yielding to its forms, becomes daily the living lie it approves?
They who go on disposing of human instincts, human affections and human brains in their own way, according to their own sense of right and wrong, should go further ”

“ They are closely connected with families here of the very highest respectability of character—the celebrated John Joseph Gurney having taken a wife from this city; and no man in the Society of Friends ranked equal to him in his day, either in religious influence, mental ability, or excellence of heart. ”