In preparing the manuscript I have stayed as close as possible to the author’s own spelling, capitalization and punctuation, adding only occasionally a clarifying word, always in square brackets. I divided some very long paragraphs for easier reading. The page numbering is mine – small Roman for the Preamble and Arabic for the remainder of the manuscript. The chapter numbers 1 through 7 are as FLB assigned them; I have added the others, setting them in square barckets.
The first seventy-some pages are the author’s final version after her many revisions. The pages now beyond these came to me in no logical order so I imposed a chronological sequence, keeping the author’s words and occasional repetitions.
What appeared intended as the last section of the original provided an added challenge: two typewritten versions were numbered similarly; treated the same topics though in at least two (possibly more) revisions and lacked section heads. I did my best with the chronological sequence, omitting only exact repetitions, and there were few. The result is some redundancy, a small monotony in so expansive a life story.
There were also several loose, unnumbered sheets of original text that came to me, but probably part of the whole. By cut-and-paste I integrated all this, kept a chronological flow, and closed with what appeared to be the intended terminal paragraph. Only exact duplications were omitted.
All of the original manuscript pages, hand and typewritten, numbered and unnumbered, await the care of an as yet unchosen family member. They are in the author’s sequence and in the imposed sequence described above. There are also versions that others have worked on. I have ignored them, dictating from what I saw as the original typescript.
Maurice Hodgen
November 2011 and September 2014.
