The story of Ayesha is not an escape, but it is about escape; about an attempt at the great escape, daringly made and terribly frustrated. Its closest relative, perhaps its child, is Morris’s The Well at the World’s End, which came ten years later. Both stories externalise the same psychological forces; our irreconcilable reluctance to die, our craving for an immortality in the flesh, our empirical knowledge that this is impossible, our intermittent awareness that it is not even really desirable, and (octaves deeper than all these) a very primitive feeling that the attempt, if it could be
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