What came to me was the idea that when she was young and first writing about Genji, she had this very idealized vision of courtly life. I think she felt very much an outsider. She was disillusioned. The political leader of the country had his own ideas about how he wanted to use her work, while she was going in another direction. It's much darker than the earlier parts.
Modern readers find it a lot more interesting.
It's very interior and her characters have a very modern sort of angst. I imagined that her readers weren't so thrilled with that, and while I don't know this, I guessed that that might be one way of explaining why she was so depressed. You don't depict romance as a tremendously important part of her life. We don't know much. She married late, and she resisted it, but then she seems to have been happy, judging from some of the poems in that later period.