Nellija’s Reviews > A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas > Status Update

Was quite unfocused reading this, was more interested in the Americans talking next to me 🫩

“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