Isabel’s Reviews > A Room of One’s Own > Status Update

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, […] then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, […] some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.”

“it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble […] without giving 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 looking-glass shrinks”

“Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quantity, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority”

“His was the power and the money and the influence. […] He will decide if the hair on the meat ax is human; he it is who will acquit or convict the murderer, and hang him, or let him go free. With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry. […] it seemed absurd, I thought, […], that a man with all this power should be angry.”

“Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what as surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women”