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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: emotion, has convulsed me with laughter, though at the instant I
should have thought it sacrilegious to have smiled. Your improvement,
my dearest girl, being ever present to me while I write, I note
these feelings, because women, more accustomed to observe manners
than actions, are too much alive to ridicule. So much so, that
their boasted sensibility is often stifled by false delicacy. True
sensibility, the sensibility which is the auxiliary of virtue, and
the soul of genius, is in society so occupied with the feelings of
others, as scarcely to regard its own sensations. With what reverence
have I looked up at my uncle, the dear parent of my mind! when I
have seen the sense of his own sufferings, of mind and body, absorbed
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