Status Updates From A Room of One's Own / Three...

“I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.“

A poor poet has not in these days (..) a dogs chance, a poor child in England has little more hope than the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born. That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time.

“And what was London doing? Nobody, it seemed,”

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortity the ditterences rather than the similarities!

“The poet was forced to be passionate or bitter, unless indeed he chose to 'hate women, which meant more often than not that he was unattractive to them.”

in the 19th century a woman was not encouraged to be an artist. On the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted.

(..) that (..) masculine complex which has had so much influence upon the woman's movement; that deep-seated desire, not so much that she shall be inferior as that he shall be superior, which plants him wherever one looks, not only in front of the arts, but barring the way to politics too

“any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.”

Hits a bit different when you take in the fact that Virginia Woolf drowned herself.

“She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband”

'Wife-beating, was a recognized right of man, and was practised without shame by high as well as low ... Similarly the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents' choice was liable to be locked up, beaten and flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not an affair of personal affection, but of family avarice, particularly in the "chivalrous" upper classes

far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the lookingglass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?

“Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”

“Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?-a thousand questions at once suggested themselves. But one needed answers, not questions;”

Yk in the end, she did a really good job of pulling it all together and summarizing what does it mean “woman and fiction”, why the situation was how it was, and how, with the advancement of society, we now are given a chance to “write” (here i use this in a metaphorical sense of just being able to do the things we wish, with less prejudice)

At one point i did just stop understanding. Like she went on some tangent and i sort of never caught up with her after talking about how woman don’t and can’t write in the style a man does. Last 3/4 pages are a blur

Yeahh deffo reads better in “The Bookstor Café” in Hague, in Netherlands on a warm Thursday afternoon ❤️

Wish i could concentrate on the book, but in all honesty, rn it is just a distraction to adhere me from tears. I feel on the verge of breaking down but i cant since im in a train, in germany, alone, one that i had to run to catch because my one got cancelled 30 min before departure, heading to a city where i right now don’t wish to be. FUN!!

I mean she did also say some smart things and that so Yippie or somth