Love Quote by Mary MacLane

Self-indictment becomes a kind of swagger here: MacLane concedes the charge of being "crude" only to seize control of it, turning shame into authorship. The repetition is a trapdoor. "You may think me crude" invites the reader to sit in judgment; "and probably I am crude" steals that gavel back. She performs humility, but it is an aggressive, lucid humility - the sort that lets a woman writer in 1902 admit desire, ego, and hunger without begging permission for them.

The pivot is the real engine: she has grown "clever enough to see" that her teenage "genius" was, in retrospect, "only an unusual girl writing her heart out". That "only" is barbed. It's meant to deflate youthful grandiosity, yet it also exposes how the culture trivializes female ambition by translating it into emotion. MacLane half-accepts the demotion and half-resists it. Calling her younger self "unusual" keeps the crown on, even as she swaps the myth of genius for the messier authority of lived feeling.

Context matters: MacLane burst into notoriety with The Story of Mary MacLane, a diaristic, scandal-tinged bestseller that treated confession as spectacle and selfhood as a public experiment. This line reads like a later corrective to that phenomenon - not an apology, but a recalibration. She frames maturation not as moral refinement but as improved optics: the crudeness hasn't vanished; it's been edited into insight. The subtext is daringly modern: the real sophistication is recognizing that sincerity can look like arrogance until time teaches you the difference.