The Weavers: a Tale of England And Egypt of Fifty Years Ago - volume 1

When I turn over the hundreds of pages of this book, I have a feelingthat I am looking upon something for which I have no particularresponsibility, though it has a strange contour of familiarity. It is asthough one looks upon a scene in which one had lived and moved, with thefriendly yet half-distant feeling that it once was one's own possessionbut is so no longer. I should think the feeling to be much like that ofthe old man whose sons, gone to distant places, have created their ownplantations of life and have themselves become the masters ofpossessions. Also I suppose that when I read the story through againfrom the first page to the last, I shall recreate the feeling in whichI lived when I wrote it, and it will become a part of my own identityagain. That distance between himself and his work, however, whichimmediately begins to grow as soon as a book leaves the author's handsfor those of the public, is a thing which, I suppose, must come to onewho produces a work of the imagination.