A Room of One's Own Page #4

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the deceased mission it is unthinkable

that any woman in Shakespeare's day

short of had Shakespeare's genius yet

genius of some sort must have existed

among women as it must have existed

among the labouring classes now and

again and Emily Bronte or Robert Burns

blazes out and proves its presence but

it certainly never got itself onto paper

when however one reads of a witch being

dumped or of a woman possessed by Devils

what of a wise woman selling herb or

even of a very remarkable man who had a

mother then I think we were onto the

track of some lost novelist some

repressed poet some mutant inglorious

Emily Bronte - her brains out on the

moors or mocked and mode on the highways

crazed with the torture that her gift

had put a do

indeed I venture to suggest that uh norm

who wrote sermon appearance without

signing them was often a woman and I

suggest it was a woman who made the.

Ballards and folk songs crooning them to

her children beguiling her spinning with

them along the length of a winter's

evening that may be true it may be false

who can say but what is true it seems to

me is that any woman born with a great

gift in the 16th century would certainly

have gone crazed shot herself or ended

her days in some lonely cottage outside

the village Partridge ha wizard feared

and mocked at

to have lived a free life in London in

the 16th century would have meant for

any woman who was poet and playwright a

nervous stress and dilemma which might

have killed her

contacted Lee had she survived when one

looks at the shelves of books where

there are no plays by women and no

poetry by women she would have gone

unsigned chastity maybe a fetish

invented by certain societies were

unknown reasons but it had been and

still has now a religious importance in

women's lives and it is a relic of that

sense of chastity which has dictated

anonymity to women and to even late in

the nineteenth century.

Cara Ellis Acton Belle George Eliot Joe

saw all victims of inner strife as their

writings prove sort ineffectively to

veil themselves by using the name of a

man

so it was a pattern that even late in

the 19th century a woman was not

encouraged to be an artist on the

contrary she was snubbed slapped

lectured and exhorted a mind must have

been strained and her vitality lured by

the need of opposing this and disproving

that for here we come within range of

that very interesting and obscure

masculine complex that deep-seated

desire not so much the tree should be

inferior but that he shall be superior

which class him wherever one looks not

only in front of the Arts but barring

the way to politics to the even lady

best black with all her passion for

politics hungry Bowser self and rights

to her fen lady loosen gore

notwithstanding my violence in politics

and talking so much from that subject I

perfectly agree with you that no woman

has any right to meddle with that or

with any serious business other than

giving her opinion if

she is asked

but what one finds amusing now when one

thinks of lady besra had to be taken in

desperate honest ones have opinions that

one now pastes in a book labeled

cockadoodle dumb drew tears once I can

assure you amongst your grandmothers and

great-grandmother's there were many who

wet their eyes and Florence Nightingale

shrieked aloud in her agony mano burr it

is opening all for you you have got

yourselves to college and enjoy sitting

rooms even bed sitting rooms of your own

for you to say Jean you should disregard.

Japan's genius should be above caring of

the world says of it unfortunately it is

precisely the men and women of genius

mind most of all what is said of them

remember heat remember the words he had

kept on his tombstone will think of

Tennyson think of but I need hardly

multiply examples of the undeniable if

very unfortunate fact that it is the

nature of the artist of mind

excessively what is said of him

literature is strewn with the wreckage

of men who have minded beyond all reason

the opinion of others because the mind

of the artist in order to achieve the

prodigious effort a freeing whole an

entire the work that is in him must be

incandescent like Shakespeare's mind

there must be no obstacle no foreign

matter unconsumed

all desire to protest to preach to

proclaim an injury to pay off an old

score to make the world witness to some

hardship must be fired out and consumed

as it was in Shakespeare's mind oh the

poetry flows out of him free and

unimpeded if ever a human being

expressed his work completely

it is Shakespeare

perhaps that's why we know so little

about him his grudges his hates his

antipathy as a hidden promise if ever

mind it was incandescent unimpeded it is.

Shakespeare's mind

that one would ever find any woman in

that state of mind in the 16th century

was impossible

and now we turn a very important corner

of the road we come to mrs. Aphra Behn a

woman forced by the death of her husband

to earn her living by her wits she had

to work on equal terms with men and by

working very hard she made enough to

live on

not the importance of that fact

outweighs anything that she ever

actually wrote for Aphra Behn proof that

money could be made by writing at the

sacrifice of perhaps a more agreeable

qualities and was of practical

importance and so by degrees writing

became not merely a sign of folly and of

a distracted mind the extreme activity

of mind among women later in the 18th

century meeting the talking the writing

of essays the translation of the

classics was founded on the solid fact

that women could make money by writing

and money dignifies what is frivolous is

unpaid for

and so later in the 18th century a

change came about which if I was

rewriting history I should find a

greater importance than the Crusades or

the Wars of the Roses the middle-class

woman began to write for if Pride and.

Prejudice matters if Middlemarch of.

Wuthering Heights

if banette matter then it matters far

more than I can prove in an hour's

discourse that women generally and not

just the lonely Aleister Pratt took to

writing for without those forerunners.

Jane Austen and the bronty's and George.

Eliot could no more have written than

Shakespeare could have written without.

Marlo or Marla without Chaucer or.

Chaucer without those forgotten poets

who tame the natural savagery of our

tongue for masterpieces are not single

and solitary efforts they are the

outcome of years of thinking in common

so that the experience of the mass is

behind the single voice.

Jane Austen should lay a wreath on the

grave of Fanny Burney and George Eliot

knew homage to the robust shade of an

Isaac Carter that valiant old woman who

tied a belt her bedstead in order that

she might wake early and learn Greek and

women everywhere should let flowers fall

on the tomb of mrs. Aphra Behn which is

scandalously but rather appropriately in.

Westminster Abbey for she it was who

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