![]() “If one shuts one’s eyes and thinks of the novel as a whole, it would seem to be a creation owning a certain looking-glass likeness to life, though of course with simplifications and distortions innumerable. Austen she places above Bronte, who was undoubtedly a genius, because her writing is emptied out of anger and hate 68. In the late 18th century, however, “middle-class women began to write” for profit 65. She considers women like Dorothy Osborne, who never wrote anything but letters, thinking it was outside their domain. It will suggest that the most intelligent woman is inferior to the average man. It will question and suppress women’s writing. But society will not pay for what it does not want. Woolf also claims women are less likely to want to impose their values on others, as is the colonial fashion 50. “Genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people” 49. “It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare” 46. Eventually she would become pregnant and commit suicide, Woolf imagines: She would try to write against the obstacles of domestic labor and a lack of education. Woolf uses the power of fiction to begin to imagine woman as more than “a vessel.” This she plays out by imagining a sister for Shakespeare: Judith. “If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance very various heroic and mean splendid and sordid infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme as great as a man, some think even greater. Woolf points out that in literature, woman is central, whereas practically, she is insignificant to society: “Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners” 41. Why did women write nothing in the age of so many great male writers? Woolf tries to imagine the conditions of women, beginning in the Elizabethan era. All assumptions founded on the facts observed when women were the protected sex will have disappeared” 40. Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions that were once denied them. “In a hundred years, I thought… women will have ceased to be the protected sex. ![]() She imagines a world where women can take any occupation, once “womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation” 40. Of the vote and money Woolf has inherited, money is unquestionably more helpful, she says. She seeks a Kantian disinterestedness: “freedom to think of things in themselves” 39. Charlotte Bronte falls victim to this, Woolf claims, which we see in her writing. Woolf abolishes anger from herself, and says (like Eliot would of self-effacement in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”), that one must purify oneself of anger and resentment to write. “Mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action” 36. “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” 35 35. She feels “humiliated” by the titles and categorizing topics available to describe women. Though men write many books about women, women do not write about men. Women do not individually or as intellectual groups have the tradition of “luxury and privacy and space” that men do 24. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,” she insists 18. Everything is plain – broth, beef and potatoes, and dry biscuits, no wine. She compares this to the women’s meal, at which the scholar Jane Harris is in attendance. No need to be anybody but oneself… how good life seemed” 11. “And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. She records the evening meal for the men, with rich wines and puddings, She is refused from the library because she has no letter of entry. She records the horror she caused at a university by being off the garden path. As in “Modern Fiction,” she says, “I give you my thoughts as they came to me” 7. The answer, for Woolf, is quite simple – in order for women to write, they must have the material conditions to write – 500 a year and a room of their own to write in. ![]() Woolf begins her treatise, as she does so many of her novels, in medias res: “But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction – what has that got to do with a room of one’s own?” 3. ![]()
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