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

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

“almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. […] and how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or sort spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.”

“she was afraid […] of being called ‘sentimental’ perhaps; or she remembers that women’s writing has been called flowery and so provides a superfluity of thorns”

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

“This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feeling of women in a drawing-room.”

“One must submit to the social convention, and be ‘cut off from what is called the world’. At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely with this gipsy or with that great lady; […] picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books.”

“Even if her father did not read out loud these opinion, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading […] must have lowered her vitality […]. There would always have been that assertion—you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that—to protest against, to overcome.”

“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.”

“She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she’s 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 profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read”

“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”