1905
This novel was written in the year 1880, only a few years after I had exportedmyself from Dublin to London in a condition of extreme rawness and inexperienceconcerning the specifically English side of the life with which the bookpretends to deal. Everybody wrote novels then. It was my second attempt; and itshared the fate of my first. That is to say, nobody would publish it, though Itried all the London publishers and some American ones. And I should notgreatly blame them if I could feel sure that it was the book’s faults andnot its qualities that repelled them.
I have narrated elsewhere how in the course of time the rejected MS. becameMrs. Annie Besant’s excuse for lending me her ever helping hand bypublishing it as a serial in a little propagandist magazine of hers. That washow it got loose beyond all possibility of recapture. It is out of my power nowto stand between it and the American public: all I can do is to rescue it fromunauthorized mutilations and make the best of a jejune job.
At present, of course, I am not the author of The Irrational Knot.Physiologists inform us that the substance of our bodies (and consequently ofour souls) is shed and renewed at such a rate that no part of us lasts longerthan eight years: I am therefore not now in any atom of me the person who wroteThe Irrational Knot in 1880. The last of that author perished in 1888; and twoof his successors have since joined