Aenea Jones

“I was six years old. A studious little girl, bright and hardworking, obedient and well behaved, and vaguely melancholy, as is often the case with the children of divorced parents.”
― Vanessa Springora, Consent

“At around the same time a man in a pub told me gender equality was impossible, as long as a man continued to be the active party in penetrative sex, the doer, the woman the done to. I’d tried telling him that surely a woman could just as actively cover a man, but he didn’t look convinced. Even then, it had all felt pointless, word games that changed nothing.”
― Megan Hunter, The Harpy

“She was in such a bad way, she couldn't see that her single life was much of a burden for me as it was for her.
A father, conspicuous only by his absence, who left an unfathomable void in my life. A pronounced taste for reading. A certain sexual precocity. And, most of all, an enormous need to be seen.
All the necessary elements were now in place.”
― Vanessa Springora, Consent

“Some children spend their days climbing trees. I spent mine in books. This was how I drowned the inconsolable sorrow in which my father's abandonment had left me. Romance and passion filled my imagination. I was far too young for the novels I read, and I understood little of them except that love makes you suffer. Why would anyone want to be destroyed so prematurely?”
― Vanessa Springora, Consent