A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.

First published in 1929.

This ebook edition was created and published by Global Grey on the 15th October
2021.
The artwork used for the cover is ‘Woman at desk’
painted by Lesser Ury.
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©Global Grey 2021
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Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
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Chapter One
But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction--what has that got to
do with a room of one's own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about
women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the
words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more
about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontë and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under
snow; some witticisms if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George
Eliot; a reference to Mrs. Gaskell and one would have done. But at second sight the
words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction might mean, and you may
have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the
fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about
them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you
want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this
last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I
should never be able to come to a conclusion. I should never be able to fulfil what is, I
understand, the first duty of a lecturer--to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget
of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the
mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point--a
woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as
you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature
of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two
questions--women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. But
in order to make some amends I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at
this opinion about the room and the money. I am going to develop in your presence as
fully and freely as I can the train of thought which led me to think this. Perhaps if I lay
bare the ideas, the prejudices, that lie behind this statement you will find that they have
some bearing upon women and some upon fiction. At any rate, when a subject is highly
controversial--and any question about sex is that--one cannot hope to tell the truth. One
can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give
one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the
limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to
contain more truth than fact. Therefore I propose, making use of all the liberties and
licences of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming
here--how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my
shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life. I need not say that
what I am about to describe has no existence; Oxbridge is an invention; so is Fernham;
"I" is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from
my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek
out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping. If not, you will of
course throw the whole of it into the waste-paper basket and forget all about it.
Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you
please--it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or
two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar I have spoken of, women
and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of
prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground. To the right and left bushes of
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some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the
heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair
about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and
burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections
they closed again, completely, as if he had never been. There one might have sat the
clock round lost in thought. Thought--to call it by a prouder name than it deserved--had
let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither
among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until--you know
the little tug--the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the
cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how
small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good
fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth
cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look
carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say.
But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind--put
back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and
sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was
impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity
across a grass plot. Instantly a man's figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first
understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and
evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct
rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf;
there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the
place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms
of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking
than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the
Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection
of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little
fish into hiding.
What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I could not now
remember. The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of
peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October
morning. Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the
present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass
cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact
with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon
whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment. As chance would have it, some
stray memory of some old essay about revisiting Oxbridge in the long vacation brought
Charles Lamb to mind--Saint Charles, said Thackeray, putting a letter of Lamb's to his
forehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I give you my thoughts as they came to me), Lamb
is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, 'Tell me then
how you wrote your essays?' For his essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm's, I
thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that
lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect,
but starred with poetry. Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago.
Certainly he wrote an essay--the name escapes me--about the manuscript of one of
Milton's poems which he saw here. It was Lycidas perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it
shocked him to think it possible that any word in Lycidas could have been different from
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what it is. To think of Milton changing the words in that poem seemed to him a sort of
sacrilege. This led me to remember what I could of Lycidas and to amuse myself with
guessing which word it could have been that Milton had altered, and why. It then
occurred to me that the very manuscript itself which Lamb had looked at was only a few
hundred yards away, so that one could follow Lamb's footsteps across the quadrangle to
that famous library where the treasure is kept. Moreover, I recollected, as I put this plan
into execution, it is in this famous library that the manuscript of Thackeray's Esmond is
also preserved. The critics often say that Esmond is Thackeray's most perfect novel. But
the affectation of the style, with its imitation of the eighteenth century, hampers one, so
far as I remember; unless indeed the eighteenth-century style was natural to
Thackeray--a fact that one might prove by looking at the manuscript and seeing
whether the alterations were for the benefit of the style or of the sense. But then one
would have to decide what is style and what is meaning, a question which--but here I
was actually at the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for
instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown
instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low
voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied
by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.
That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference
to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked within its
breast, it sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep for ever. Never
will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I
descended the steps in anger. Still an hour remained before luncheon, and what was one
to do? Stroll on the meadows? sit by the river? Certainly it was a lovely autumn
morning; the leaves were fluttering red to the ground; there was no great hardship in
doing either. But the sound of music reached my ear. Some service or celebration was
going forward. The organ complained magnificently as I passed the chapel door. Even
the sorrow of Christianity sounded in that serene air more like the recollection of
sorrow than sorrow itself; even the groanings of the ancient organ seemed lapped in
peace. I had no wish to enter had I the right, and this time the verger might have
stopped me, demanding perhaps my baptismal certificate, or a letter of introduction
from the Dean. But the outside of these magnificent buildings is often as beautiful as the
inside. Moreover, it was amusing enough to watch the congregation assembling, coming
in and going out again, busying themselves at the door of the Chapel like bees at the
mouth of a hive. Many were in cap and gown; some had tufts of fur on their shoulders;
others were wheeled in bath-chairs; others, though not past middle age, seemed creased
and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and
crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium. As I leant against the
wall the University indeed seemed a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types which
would soon be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand. Old
stories of old deans and old dons came back to mind, but before I had summoned up
courage to whistle--it used to be said that at the sound of a whistle old Professor ----
instantly broke into a gallop--the venerable congregation had gone inside. The outside
of the chapel remained. As you know, its high domes and pinnacles can be seen, like a
sailing-ship always voyaging never arriving, lit up at night and visible for miles, far away
across the hills. Once, presumably, this quadrangle with its smooth lawns, its massive
buildings and the chapel itself was marsh too, where the grasses waved and the swine
rootled. Teams of horses and oxen, I thought, must have hauled the stone in wagons
from far counties, and then with infinite labour the grey blocks in whose shade I was
 4

now standing were poised in order one on top of another, and then the painters brought
their glass for the windows, and the masons were busy for centuries up on that roof
with putty and cement, spade and trowel. Every Saturday somebody must have poured
gold and silver out of a leathern purse into their ancient fists, for they had their beer and
skittles presumably of an evening. An unending stream of gold and silver, I thought,
must have flowed into this court perpetually to keep the stones coming and the masons
working; to level, to ditch, to dig and to drain. But it was then the age of faith, and
money was poured liberally to set these stones on a deep foundation, and when the
stones were raised, still more money was poured in from the coffers of kings and
queens and great nobles to ensure that hymns should be sung here and scholars taught.
Lands were granted; tithes were paid. And when the age of faith was over and the age of
reason had come, still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships were
founded; lectureships endowed; only the gold and silver flowed now, not from the
coffers of the king, but from the chests of merchants and manufacturers, from the
purses of men who had made, say, a fortune from industry, and returned, in their wills, a
bounteous share of it to endow more chairs, more lectureships, more fellowships in the
university where they had learnt their craft. Hence the libraries and laboratories; the
observatories; the splendid equipment of costly and delicate instruments which now
stands on glass shelves, where centuries ago the grasses waved and the swine rootled.
Certainly, as I strolled round the court, the foundation of gold and silver seemed deep
enough; the pavement laid solidly over the wild grasses. Men with trays on their heads
went busily from staircase to staircase. Gaudy blossoms flowered in window-boxes. The
strains of the gramophone blared out from the rooms within. It was impossible not to
reflect--the reflection whatever it may have been was cut short. The clock struck. It was
time to find one's way to luncheon.
It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties
are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very
wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the
novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and
salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a
cigar or drank a glass of wine. Here, however, I shall take the liberty to defy that
convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a
deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream,
save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of
a doe. After that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds
on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many and various, came with all their
retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes,
thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent.
And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been done with than the silent serving-man,
the Beadle himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, set before us, wreathed in
napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding and so
relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult. Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed
yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees
was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric
light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound,
subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No
need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going
to heaven and Vandyck is of the company--in other words, how good life seemed, how
sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship
 5

and the society of one's kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions
in the window-seat.
If by good luck there had been an ash-tray handy, if one had not knocked the ash out of
the window in default, if things had been a little different from what they were, one
would not have seen, presumably, a cat without a tail. The sight of that abrupt and
truncated animal padding softly across the quadrangle changed by some fluke of the
subconscious intelligence the emotional light for me. It was as if someone had let fall a
shade. Perhaps the excellent hock was relinquishing its hold. Certainly, as I watched the
Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too questioned the universe, something
seemed lacking, something seemed different. But what was lacking, what was different, I
asked myself, listening to the talk? And to answer that question I had to think myself out
of the room, back into the past, before the war indeed, and to set before my eyes the
model of another luncheon party held in rooms not very far distant from these; but
different. Everything was different. Meanwhile the talk went on among the guests, who
were many and young, some of this sex, some of that; it went on swimmingly, it went on
agreeably, freely, amusingly. And as it went on I set it against the background of that
other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the
descendant, the legitimate heir of the other. Nothing was changed; nothing was different
save only--here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the
murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it--the change was there. Before the war at a
luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they
would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort
of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the
words themselves. Could one set that humming noise to words? Perhaps with the help
of the poets one could. A book lay beside me and, opening it, I turned casually enough to
Tennyson. And here I found Tennyson was singing:
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near";
And the white rose weeps, "She is late";
The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear";
And the lily whispers, "I wait."
Was that what men hummed at luncheon parties before the war? And the women?
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Was that what women hummed at luncheon parties before the war?
There was something so ludicrous in thinking of people humming such things even
under their breath at luncheon parties before the war that I burst out laughing, and had
to explain my laughter by pointing at the Manx cat, who did look a little absurd, poor
 6

beast, without a tail, in the middle of the lawn. Was he really born so, or had he lost his
tail in an accident? The tailless cat, though some are said to exist in the Isle of Man, is
rarer than one thinks. It is a queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful. It is strange
what a difference a tail makes--you know the sort of things one says as a lunch party
breaks up and people are finding their coats and hats.
This one, thanks to the hospitality of the host, had lasted far into the afternoon. The
beautiful October day was fading and the leaves were falling from the trees in the
avenue as I walked through it. Gate after gate seemed to close with gentle finality
behind me. Innumerable beadles were fitting innumerable keys into well-oiled locks;
the treasure-house was being made secure for another night. After the avenue one
comes out upon a road--I forget its name--which leads you, if you take the right turning,
along to Fernham. But there was plenty of time. Dinner was not till half-past seven. One
could almost do without dinner after such a luncheon. It is strange how a scrap of
poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road. Those
words--
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear--
sang in my blood as I stepped quickly along towards Headingley. And then, switching off
into the other measure, I sang, where the waters are churned up by the weir:
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree...
What poets, I cried aloud, as one does in the dusk, what poets they were!
In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own age, silly and absurd though these
comparisons are, I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two living poets now
as great as Tennyson and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously it is impossible, I
thought, looking into those foaming waters, to compare them. The very reason why that
poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling
that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one
responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with
any that one has now. But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made
and torn out of us at the moment. One does not recognise it in the first place; often for
some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and
suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the difficulty of modern poetry;
and it is because of this difficulty that one cannot remember more than two consecutive
lines of any good modern poet. For this reason--that my memory failed me--the
argument flagged for want of material. But why, I continued, moving on towards
Headingley, have we stopped humming under our breath at luncheon parties? Why has
Alfred ceased to sing
She is coming, my dove, my dear.
Why has Christina ceased to respond?
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me?
 7

Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of
men and women show so plain in each other's eyes that romance was killed? Certainly it
was a shock (to women in particular with their illusions about education, and so on) to
see the faces of our rulers in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked--German,
English, French--so stupid. But lay the blame where one will, on whom one will, the
illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about
the coming of their loves is far rarer now than then. One has only to read, to look, to
listen, to remember. But why say "blame"? Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the
catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place? For
truth... those dots mark the spot where, in search of truth, I missed the turning up to
Fernham. Yes indeed, which was truth and which was illusion, I asked myself? What was
the truth about these houses, for example, dim and festive now with their red windows
in the dusk, but raw and red and squalid, with their sweets and their bootlaces, at nine
o'clock in the morning? And the willows and the river and the gardens that run down to
the river, vague now with the mist stealing over them, but gold and red in the sunlight--
which was the truth, which was the illusion about them? I spare you the twists and
turns of my cogitations, for no conclusion was found on the road to Headingley, and I
ask you to suppose that I soon found out my mistake about the turning and retraced my
steps to Fernham.
As I have said already that it was an October day, I dare not forfeit your respect and
imperil the fair name of fiction by changing the season and describing lilacs hanging
over garden walls, crocuses, tulips and other flowers of spring. Fiction must stick to
facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction--so we are told. Therefore it was still
autumn and the leaves were still yellow and falling, if anything, a little faster than
before, because it was now evening (seven twenty-three to be precise) and a breeze
(from the south-west to be exact) had risen. But for all that there was something odd at
work:
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit--
perhaps the words of Christina Rossetti were partly responsible for the folly of the
fancy--it was nothing of course but a fancy--that the lilac was shaking its flowers over
the garden walls, and the brimstone butterflies were scudding hither and thither, and
the dust of the pollen was in the air. A wind blew, from what quarter I know not, but it
lifted the half-grown leaves so that there was a flash of silver grey in the air. It was the
time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and
golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason
the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden,
for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the
world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting
the heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild
and open, and in the long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung, were daffodils and
bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times, and now wind-blown and waving as
they tugged at their roots. The windows of the building, curved like ships' windows
among generous waves of red brick, changed from lemon to silver under the flight of the
quick spring clouds. Somebody was in a hammock, somebody, but in this light they were
phantoms only, half guessed, half seen, raced across the grass--would no one stop her?--
 8

and then on the terrace, as if popping out to breathe the air, to glance at the garden,
came a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby
dress--could it be the famous scholar, could it be J---- H---- herself? All was dim, yet
intense too, as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder
by star or sword--the flash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart
of the spring. For youth----
Here was my soup. Dinner was being served in the great dining-hall. Far from being
spring it was in fact an evening in October. Everybody was assembled in the big dining-
room. Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup. There was
nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any
pattern that there might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The
plate was plain. Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes--a homely
trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and
yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening, and women with string bags on
Monday morning. There was no reason to complain of human nature's daily food, seeing
that the supply was sufficient and coal-miners doubtless were sitting down to less.
Prunes and custard followed. And if anyone complains that prunes, even when
mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a
miser's heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in misers' veins who have denied
themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor, he should
reflect that there are people whose charity embraces even the prune. Biscuits and
cheese came next, and here the water-jug was liberally passed round, for it is the nature
of biscuits to be dry, and these were biscuits to the core. That was all. The meal was
over. Everybody scraped their chairs back; the swing-doors swung violently to and fro;
soon the hall was emptied of every sign of food and made ready no doubt for breakfast
next morning. Down corridors and up staircases the youth of England went banging and
singing. And was it for a guest, a stranger (for I had no more right here in Fernham than
in Trinity or Somerville or Girton or Newnham or Christchurch), to say, "The dinner was
not good," or to say (we were now, Mary Seton and I, in her sitting-room), "Could we not
have dined up here alone?" for if I had said anything of the kind I should have been
prying and searching into the secret economies of a house which to the stranger wears
so fine a front of gaiety and courage. No, one could say nothing of the sort. Indeed,
conversation for a moment flagged. The human frame being what it is, heart, body and
brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no
doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One
cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine
does not light on beef and prunes. We are all probably going to heaven, and Vandyck is,
we hope, to meet us round the next corner--that is the dubious and qualifying state of
mind that beef and prunes at the end of the day's work breed between them. Happily
my friend, who taught science, had a cupboard where there was a squat bottle and little
glasses--(but there should have been sole and partridge to begin with)--so that we were
able to draw up to the fire and repair some of the damages of the day's living. In a
minute or so we were slipping freely in and out among all those objects of curiosity and
interest which form in the mind in the absence of a particular person, and are naturally
to be discussed on coming together again--how somebody has married, another has not;
one thinks this, another that; one has improved out of all knowledge, the other most
amazingly gone to the bad--with all those speculations upon human nature and the
character of the amazing world we live in which spring naturally from such beginnings.
While these things were being said, however, I became shamefacedly aware of a current
 9

setting in of its own accord and carrying everything forward to an end of its own. One
might be talking of Spain or Portugal, of book or racehorse, but the real interest of
whatever was said was none of those things, but a scene of masons on a high roof some
five centuries ago. Kings and nobles brought treasure in huge sacks and poured it under
the earth. This scene was for ever coming alive in my mind and placing itself by another
of lean cows and a muddy market and withered greens and the stringy hearts of old
men--these two pictures, disjointed and disconnected and nonsensical as they were,
were for ever coming together and combating each other and had me entirely at their
mercy. The best course, unless the whole talk was to be distorted, was to expose what
was in my mind to the air, when with good luck it would fade and crumble like the head
of the dead king when they opened the coffin at Windsor. Briefly, then, I told Miss Seton
about the masons who had been all those years on the roof of the chapel, and about the
kings and queens and nobles bearing sacks of gold and silver on their shoulders, which
they shovelled into the earth; and then how the great financial magnates of our own
time came and laid cheques and bonds, I suppose, where the others had laid ingots and
rough lumps of gold. All that lies beneath the colleges down there, I said; but this
college, where we are now sitting, what lies beneath its gallant red brick and the wild
unkempt grasses of the garden? What force is behind that plain china off which we
dined, and (here it popped out of my mouth before I could stop it) the beef, the custard
and the prunes?
Well, said Mary Seton, about the year 1860--Oh, but you know the story, she said, bored,
I suppose, by the recital. And she told me--rooms were hired. Committees met.
Envelopes were addressed. Circulars were drawn up. Meetings were held; letters were
read out; so-and-so has promised so much; on the contrary, Mr. ---- won't give a penny.
The Saturday Review has been very rude. How can we raise a fund to pay for offices?
Shall we hold a bazaar? Can't we find a pretty girl to sit in the front row? Let us look up
what John Stuart Mill said on the subject. Can anyone persuade the editor of the ---- to
print a letter? Can we get Lady ---- to sign it? Lady ---- is out of town. That was the way it
was done, presumably, sixty years ago, and it was a prodigious effort, and a great deal of
time was spent on it. And it was only after a long struggle and with the utmost difficulty
that they got thirty thousand pounds together. 1 So obviously we cannot have wine and
partridges and servants carrying tin dishes on their heads, she said. We cannot have
sofas and separate rooms. "The amenities," she said, quoting from some book or other,
"will have to wait." 2
At the thought of all those women working year after year and finding it hard to get two
thousand pounds together, and as much as they could do to get thirty thousand pounds,
we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex. What had our mothers
been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking in
at shop windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo? There were some photographs
on the mantelpiece. Mary's mother--if that was her picture--may have been a wastrel in
her spare time (she had thirteen children by a minister of the church), but if so her gay
and dissipated life had left too few traces of its pleasures on her face. She was a homely

1 "We are told that we ought to ask for £30,000 at least.... It is not a large sum, considering that there is to
be but one college of this sort for Great Britain, Ireland and the Colonies, and considering how easy it is to
raise immense sums for boys' schools. But considering how few people really wish women to be
educated, it is a good deal."--Lady Stephen, Emily Davies and Girton College.
2 Every penny which could be scraped together was set aside for building, and the amenities had to be

postponed.--R. Strachey, The Cause.

 10

body; an old lady in a plaid shawl which was fastened by a large cameo; and she sat in a
basket-chair, encouraging a spaniel to look at the camera, with the amused, yet strained
expression of one who is sure that the dog will move directly the bulb is pressed. Now if
she had gone into business; had become a manufacturer of artificial silk or a magnate on
the Stock Exchange; if she had left two or three hundred thousand pounds to Fernham,
we could have been sitting at our ease to-night and the subject of our talk might have
been archaeology, botany, anthropology, physics, the nature of the atom, mathematics,
astronomy, relativity, geography. If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother
before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their
fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and
prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex, we might have dined
very tolerably up here alone off a bird and a bottle of wine; we might have looked
forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honourable lifetime spent in the
shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring or
writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the
steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-
past four to write a little poetry. Only, if Mrs. Seton and her like had gone into business
at the age of fifteen, there would have been--that was the snag in the argument--no
Mary. What, I asked, did Mary think of that? There between the curtains was the
October night, calm and lovely, with a star or two caught in the yellowing trees. Was she
ready to resign her share of it and her memories (for they had been a happy family,
though a large one) of games and quarrels up in Scotland, which she is never tired of
praising for the fineness of its air and the quality of its cakes, in order that Fernham
might have been endowed with fifty thousand pounds or so by a stroke of the pen? For,
to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a
fortune and bearing thirteen children--no human being could stand it. Consider the
facts, we said. First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is
born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is
fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let
children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say
that the sight is not a pleasant one. People say, too, that human nature takes its shape in
the years between one and five. If Mrs. Seton, I said, had been making money, what sort
of memories would you have had of games and quarrels? What would you have known
of Scotland, and its fine air and cakes and all the rest of it? But it is useless to ask these
questions, because you would never have come into existence at all. Moreover, it is
equally useless to ask what might have happened if Mrs. Seton and her mother and her
mother before her had amassed great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college
and library, because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in
the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money
they earned. It is only for the last forty-eight years that Mrs. Seton has had a penny of
her own. For all the centuries before that it would have been her husband's property--a
thought which, perhaps, may have had its share in keeping Mrs. Seton and her mothers
off the Stock Exchange. Every penny I earn, they may have said, will be taken from me
and disposed of according to my husband's wisdom--perhaps to found a scholarship or
to endow a fellowship in Balliol or Kings, so that to earn money, even if I could earn
money, is not a matter that interests me very greatly. I had better leave it to my
husband.
At any rate, whether or not the blame rested on the old lady who was looking at the
spaniel, there could be no doubt that for some reason or other our mothers had
 11

mismanaged their affairs very gravely. Not a penny could be spared for "amenities"; for
partridges and wine, beadles and turf, books and cigars, libraries and leisure. To raise
bare walls out of the bare earth was the utmost they could do.
So we talked standing at the window and looking, as so many thousands look every
night, down on the domes and towers of the famous city beneath us. It was very
beautiful, very mysterious in the autumn moonlight. The old stone looked very white
and venerable. One thought of all the books that were assembled down there; of the
pictures of old prelates and worthies hanging in the panelled rooms; of the painted
windows that would be throwing strange globes and crescents on the pavement; of the
tablets and memorials and inscriptions; of the fountains and the grass; of the quiet
rooms looking across the quiet quadrangles. And (pardon me the thought) I thought,
too, of the admirable smoke and drink and the deep arm-chairs and the pleasant
carpets: of the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and
privacy and space. Certainly our mothers had not provided us with any thing
comparable to all this--our mothers who found it difficult to scrape together thirty
thousand pounds, our mothers who bore thirteen children to ministers of religion at St.
Andrews.
So I went back to my inn, and as I walked through the dark streets I pondered this and
that, as one does at the end of the day's work. I pondered why it was that Mrs. Seton had
no money to leave us; and what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth
has on the mind; and I thought of the queer old gentlemen I had seen that morning with
tufts of fur upon their shoulders; and I remembered how if one whistled one of them
ran; and I thought of the organ booming in the chapel and of the shut doors of the
library; and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is
worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex
and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the
lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up
the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and
its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue
wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society. All human beings were
laid asleep--prone, horizontal, dumb. Nobody seemed stirring in the streets of Oxbridge.
Even the door of the hotel sprang open at the touch of an invisible hand--not a boots
was sitting up to light me to bed, it was so late.
 12

Chapter Two

The scene, if I may ask you to follow me, was now changed. The leaves were still falling,
but in London now, not Oxbridge; and I must ask you to imagine a room, like many
thousands, with a window looking across people's hats and vans and motorcars to other
windows, and on the table inside the room a blank sheet of paper on which was written
in large letters Women and Fiction, but no more. The inevitable sequel to lunching and
dining at Oxbridge seemed, unfortunately, to be a visit to the British Museum. One must
strain off what was personal and accidental in all these impressions and so reach the
pure fluid, the essential oil of truth. For that visit to Oxbridge and the luncheon and the
dinner had started a swarm of questions. 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; and an
answer was only to be had by consulting the learned and the unprejudiced, who have
removed themselves above the strife of tongue and the confusion of body and issued the
result of their reasoning and research in books which are to be found in the British
Museum. If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked
myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?
Thus provided, thus confident and enquiring, I set out in the pursuit of truth. The day,
though not actually wet, was dismal, and the streets in the neighbourhood of the
Museum were full of open coal-holes, down which sacks were showering; four-wheeled
cabs were drawing up and depositing on the pavement corded boxes containing,
presumably, the entire wardrobe of some Swiss or Italian family seeking fortune or
refuge or some other desirable commodity which is to be found in the boarding-houses
of Bloomsbury in the winter. The usual hoarse-voiced men paraded the streets with
plants on barrows. Some shouted; others sang. London was like a workshop. London
was like a machine. We were all being shot backwards and forwards on this plain
foundation to make some pattern. The British Museum was another department of the
factory. The swing-doors swung open; and there one stood under the vast dome, as if
one were a thought in the huge bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band
of famous names. One went to the counter; one took a slip of paper; one opened a
volume of the catalogue, and..... the five dots here indicate five separate minutes of
stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment. Have you any notion how many books are
written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are
written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the
universe? Here had I come with a notebook and a pencil proposing to spend a morning
reading, supposing that at the end of the morning I should have transferred the truth to
my notebook. But I should need to be a herd of elephants, I thought, and a wilderness of
spiders, desperately referring to the animals that are reputed longest lived and most
multitudinously eyed, to cope with all this. I should need claws of steel and beak of
brass even to penetrate the husk. How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in
all this mass of paper? I asked myself, and in despair began running my eye up and
down the long list of titles. Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. Sex
and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and
 13

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. Some of these books were, on the face of it, frivolous and
facetious; but many, on the other hand, were serious and prophetic, moral and
hortatory. Merely to read the titles suggested innumerable schoolmasters, innumerable
clergymen mounting their platforms and pulpits and holding forth with a loquacity
which far exceeded the hour usually allotted to such discourse on this one subject. It
was a most strange phenomenon; and apparently--here I consulted the letter M--one
confined to the male sex. Women do not write books about men--a fact that I could not
help welcoming with relief, for if I had first to read all that men have written about
women, then all that women have written about men, the aloe that flowers once in a
hundred years would flower twice before I could set pen to paper. So, making a
perfectly arbitrary choice of a dozen volumes or so, I sent my slips of paper to lie in the
wire tray, and waited in my stall, among the other seekers for the essential oil of truth.
What could be the reason, then, of this curious disparity, I wondered, drawing
cartwheels on the slips of paper provided by the British taxpayer for other purposes.
Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than
men are to women? A very curious fact it seemed, and my mind wandered to picture the
lives of men who spend their time in writing books about women; whether they were
old or young, married or unmarried, red-nosed or hump-backed--anyhow, it was
flattering, vaguely, to feel oneself the object of such attention, provided that it was not
entirely bestowed by the crippled and the infirm--so I pondered until all such frivolous
thoughts were ended by an avalanche of books sliding down on to the desk in front of
me. Now the trouble began. The student who has been trained in research at Oxbridge
has no doubt some method of shepherding his question past all distractions till it runs
into its answer as a sheep runs into its pen. The student by my side, for instance, who
was copying assiduously from a scientific manual, was, I felt sure, extracting pure
nuggets of the essential ore every ten minutes or so. His little grunts of satisfaction
indicated so much. But if, unfortunately, one has had no training in a university, the
question far from being shepherded to its pen flies like a frightened flock hither and
thither, helter-skelter, pursued by a whole pack of hounds. Professors, schoolmasters,
sociologists, clergymen, novelists, essayists, journalists, men who had no qualification
save that they were not women, chased my simple and single question--Why are women
poor?--until it became fifty questions; until the fifty questions leapt frantically into mid-
stream and were carried away. Every page in my notebook was scribbled over with
notes. To show the state of mind I was in, I will read you a few of them, explaining that
the page was headed quite simply, Women and Poverty, in block letters; but what
followed was something like this:
Condition in Middle Ages of,
Habits in the Fiji Islands of,
Worshipped as goddesses by,
Weaker in moral sense than,
Idealism of,
Greater conscientiousness of,
South Sea Islanders, age of puberty among,
Attractiveness of,
Offered as sacrifice to,
 14

Small size of brain of,

Profounder sub-consciousness of,
Less hair on the body of,
Mental, moral and physical inferiority of,
Love of children of,
Greater length of life of,
Weaker muscles of,
Strength of affections of,
Vanity of,
Higher education of,
Shakespeare's opinion of,
Lord Birkenhead's opinion of,
Dean Inge's opinion of,
La Bruyère's opinion of,
Dr. Johnson's opinion of,
Mr. Oscar Browning's opinion of,...
Here I drew breath and added, indeed, in the margin, Why does Samuel Butler say,
"Wise men never say what they think of women?" Wise men never say anything else
apparently. But, I continued, leaning back in my chair and looking at the vast dome in
which I was a single but by now somewhat harassed thought, what is so unfortunate is
that wise men never think the same thing about women. Here is Pope:
Most women have no character at all.
And here is La Bruyère:
Les femmes sont extrêmes; elles sont meilleures ou pires que les hommes--
a direct contradiction by keen observers who were contemporary. Are they capable of
education or incapable? Napoleon thought them incapable. Dr. Johnson thought the
opposite. 3 Have they souls or have they not souls? Some savages say they have none.
Others, on the contrary, maintain that women are half divine and worship them on that
account. 4 Some sages hold that they are shallower in the brain; others that they are
deeper in the consciousness. Goethe honoured them; Mussolini despises them.
Wherever one looked men thought about women and thought differently. It was
impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next
door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while
my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was
distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers.
Every drop had escaped.
I could not possibly go home, I reflected, and add as a serious contribution to the study
of women and fiction that women have less hair on their bodies than men, or that the
age of puberty among the South Sea Islanders is nine--or is it ninety?--even the
handwriting had become in its distraction indecipherable. It was disgraceful to have
nothing more weighty or respectable to show after a whole morning's work. And if I

3 "'Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most
ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.' ...
In justice to the sex, I think it but candid to acknowledge that, in a subsequent conversation, he told me
that he was serious in what he said."--Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.
4 "The ancient Germans believed that there was something holy in women, and accordingly consulted

them as oracles."--Frazer, Golden Bough.

 15

could not grasp the truth about W. (as for brevity's sake I had come to call her) in the
past, why bother about W. in the future? It seemed pure waste of time to consult all
those gentlemen who specialise in woman and her effect on whatever it may be--
politics, children, wages, morality--numerous and learned as they are. One might as well
leave their books unopened.
But while I pondered I had unconsciously, in my listlessness, in my desperation, been
drawing a picture where I should, like my neighbour, have been writing a conclusion. I
had been drawing a face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor von X.
engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical
Inferiority of the Female Sex. He was not in my picture a man attractive to women. He
was heavily built; he had a great jowl; to balance that he had very small eyes; he was
very red in the face. His expression suggested that he was labouring under some
emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious
insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on
killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained. Could it be his wife,
I asked, looking at my picture? Was she in love with a cavalry officer? Was the cavalry
officer slim and elegant and dressed in astrachan? Had he been laughed at, to adopt the
Freudian theory, in his cradle by a pretty girl? For even in his cradle the professor, I
thought, could not have been an attractive child. Whatever the reason, the professor
was made to look very angry and very ugly in my sketch, as he wrote his great book
upon the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. Drawing pictures was an idle
way of finishing an unprofitable morning's work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams,
that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. A very elementary exercise in
psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking
at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger
had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest,
confusion, amusement, boredom--all these emotions I could trace and name as they
succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking
among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had. It referred me unmistakably to the one
book, to the one phrase, which had roused the demon; it was the professor's statement
about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. My heart had leapt. My
cheeks had burnt. I had flushed with anger. There was nothing specially remarkable,
however foolish, in that. One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of
a little man--I looked at the student next me--who breathes hard, wears a ready-made
tie, and has not shaved this fortnight. One has certain foolish vanities. It is only human
nature, I reflected, and began drawing cartwheels and circles over the angry professor's
face till he looked like a burning bush or a flaming comet--anyhow, an apparition
without human semblance or significance. The professor was nothing now but a faggot
burning on the top of Hampstead Heath. Soon my own anger was explained and done
with; but curiosity remained. How explain the anger of the professors? Why were they
angry? For when it came to analysing the impression left by these books there was
always an element of heat. This heat took many forms; it showed itself in satire, in
sentiment, in curiosity, in reprobation. But there was another element which was often
present and could not immediately be identified. Anger, I called it. But it was anger that
had gone underground and mixed itself with all kinds of other emotions. To judge from
its odd effects, it was anger disguised and complex, not anger simple and open.
Whatever the reason, all these books, I thought, surveying the pile on the desk, are
worthless for my purposes. They were worthless scientifically, that is to say, though
 16

humanly they were full of instruction, interest, boredom, and very queer facts about the
habits of the Fiji Islanders. They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in
the white light of truth. Therefore they must be returned to the central desk and
restored each to his own cell in the enormous honeycomb. All that I had retrieved from
that morning's work had been the one fact of anger. The professors--I lumped them
together thus--were angry. But why, I asked myself, having returned the books, why, I
repeated, standing under the colonnade among the pigeons and the prehistoric canoes,
why are they angry? And, asking myself this question, I strolled off to find a place for
luncheon. What is the real nature of what I call for the moment their anger? I asked.
Here was a puzzle that would last all the time that it takes to be served with food in a
small restaurant somewhere near the British Museum. Some previous luncher had left
the lunch edition of the evening paper on a chair, and, waiting to be served, I began idly
reading the headlines. A ribbon of very large letters ran across the page. Somebody had
made a big score in South Africa. Lesser ribbons announced that Sir Austen Chamberlain
was at Geneva. A meat axe with human hair on it had been found in a cellar. Mr. Justice -
--- commented in the Divorce Courts upon the Shamelessness of Women. Sprinkled
about the paper were other pieces of news. A film actress had been lowered from a peak
in California and hung suspended in mid-air. The weather was going to be foggy. The
most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to
be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a
patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor.
His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper
and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge. He was the
cricketer; he owned the racehorses and the yachts. He was the director of the company
that pays two hundred per cent to its shareholders. He left millions to charities and
colleges that were ruled by himself. He suspended the film actress in mid-air. He will
decide if the hair on the meat axe 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. I knew that he was angry by this token. When I
read what he wrote about women I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself.
When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument; and the reader
cannot help thinking of the argument too. If he had written dispassionately about
women, had used indisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no trace
of wishing that the result should be one thing rather than another, one would not have
been angry either. One would have accepted the fact, as one accepts the fact that a pea is
green or a canary yellow. So be it, I should have said. But I had been angry because he
was angry. Yet it seemed absurd, I thought, turning over the evening paper, that a man
with all this power should be angry. Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the
attendant sprite on power? Rich people, for example, are often angry because they
suspect that the poor want to seize their wealth. The professors, or patriarchs, as it
might be more accurate to call them, might be angry for that reason partly, but partly
for one that lies a little less obviously on the surface. Possibly they were not "angry" at
all; often, indeed, they were admiring, devoted, exemplary in the relations of private life.
Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of
women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That
was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because
it was a jewel to him of the rarest price. Life for both sexes--and I looked at them,
shouldering their way along the pavement--is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It
calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of
 17

illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as

babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so
invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling
that one has some innate superiority--it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the
portrait of a grandfather by Romney--for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the
human imagination--over other people. Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch
who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the
human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief
sources of his power. But let me turn the light of this observation on to real life, I
thought. Does it help to explain some of those psychological puzzles that one notes in
the margin of daily life? Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most
humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a
passage in it, exclaimed, "The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!" The
exclamation, to me so surprising--for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making
a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex?--was not merely the
cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to
believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing
the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of
all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the
remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple
ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never
have existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them.
Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and
heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the
inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That
serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And 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, or whatever it may be, 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; his
fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising 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? So I reflected,
crumbling my bread and stirring my coffee and now and again looking at the people in
the street. The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the
vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug
fiend deprived of his cocaine. Under the spell of that illusion, I thought, looking out of
the window, half the people on the pavement are striding to work. They put on their
hats and coats in the morning under its agreeable rays. They start the day confident,
braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith's tea party; they say to themselves
as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that
they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound
consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private
mind.
But these contributions to the dangerous and fascinating subject of the psychology of
the other sex--it is one, I hope, that you will investigate when you have five hundred a
year of your own--were interrupted by the necessity of paying the bill. It came to five
shillings and ninepence. I gave the waiter a ten-shilling note and he went to bring me
 18

change. There was another ten-shilling note in my purse; I noticed it, because it is a fact
that still takes my breath away--the power of my purse to breed ten-shilling notes
automatically. I open it and there they are. Society gives me chicken and coffee, bed and
lodging, in return for a certain number of pieces of paper which were left me by an aunt,
for no other reason than that I share her name.
My aunt, Mary Beton, I must tell you, died by a fall from her horse when she was riding
out to take the air in Bombay. The news of my legacy reached me one night about the
same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor's letter fell into
the post-box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a
year for ever. Of the two--the vote and the money--the money, I own, seemed infinitely
the more important. Before that I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from
newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned a few
pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers,
teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten. Such were the chief
occupations that were open to women before 1918. I need not, I am afraid, describe in
any detail the hardness of the work, for you know perhaps women who have done it;
nor the difficulty of living on the money when it was earned, for you may have tried. But
what still remains with me as a worse infliction than either was the poison of fear and
bitterness which those days bred in me. To begin with, always to be doing work that one
did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always
necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks;
and then the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide--a small one but dear to
the possessor--perishing and with it my self, my soul,--all this became like a rust eating
away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart. However, as I say, my aunt
died; and whenever I change a ten-shilling note a little of that rust and corrosion is
rubbed off; fear and bitterness go. Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it
is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a
fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred
pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and
labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt
me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found
myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absurd
to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible
for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control. They
too, the patriarchs, the professors, had endless difficulties, terrible drawbacks to
contend with. Their education had been in some ways as faulty as my own. It had bred
in them defects as great. True, they had money and power, but only at the cost of
harbouring in their breasts an eagle, a vulture, for ever tearing the liver out and
plucking at the lungs--the instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition which drives
them to desire other people's fields and goods perpetually; to make frontiers and flags;
battleships and poison gas; to offer up their own lives and their children's lives. Walk
through the Admiralty Arch (I had reached that monument), or any other avenue given
up to trophies and cannon, and reflect upon the kind of glory celebrated there. Or watch
in the spring sunshine the stockbroker and the great barrister going indoors to make
money and more money and more money when it is a fact that five hundred pounds a
year will keep one alive in the sunshine. These are unpleasant instincts to harbour, I
reflected. They are bred of the conditions of life; of the lack of civilisation, I thought,
looking at the statue of the Duke of Cambridge, and in particular at the feathers in his
cocked hat, with a fixity that they have scarcely ever received before. And, as I realised
 19

these drawbacks, by degrees fear and bitterness modified themselves into pity and
toleration; and then in a year or two, pity and toleration went, and the greatest release
of all came, which is freedom to think of things in themselves. That building, for
example, do I like it or not? Is that picture beautiful or not? Is that in my opinion a good
book or a bad? Indeed my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the
large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual
adoration, a view of the open sky.
So thinking, so speculating I found my way back to my house by the river. Lamps were
being lit and an indescribable change had come over London since the morning hour. It
was as if the great machine after labouring all day had made with our help a few yards
of something very exciting and beautiful--a fiery fabric flashing with red eyes, a tawny
monster roaring with hot breath. Even the wind seemed flung like a flag as it lashed the
houses and rattled the hoardings.
In my little street, however, domesticity prevailed. The house painter was descending
his ladder; the nursemaid was wheeling the perambulator carefully in and out back to
nursery tea; the coal-heaver was folding his empty sacks on top of each other; the
woman who keeps the greengrocer's shop was adding up the day's takings with her
hands in red mittens. But so engrossed was I with the problem you have laid upon my
shoulders that I could not see even these usual sights without referring them to one
centre. I thought how much harder it is now than it must have been even a century ago
to say which of these employments is the higher, the more necessary. Is it better to be a
coal-heaver or a nursemaid; is the charwoman who has brought up eight children of less
value to the world than the barrister who has made a hundred thousand pounds? It is
useless to ask such questions; for nobody can answer them. Not only do the
comparative values of charwomen and lawyers rise and fall from decade to decade, but
we have no rods with which to measure them even as they are at the moment. I had
been foolish to ask my professor to furnish me with "indisputable proofs" of this or that
in his argument about women. Even if one could state the value of any one gift at the
moment, those values will change; in a century's time very possibly they will have
changed completely. Moreover, in a hundred years, I thought, reaching my own
doorstep, women will have ceased to be the protected sex. Logically they will take part
in all the activities and exertions that were once denied them. The nursemaid will heave
coal. The shopwoman will drive an engine. All assumptions founded on the facts
observed when women were the protected sex will have disappeared--as, for example
(here a squad of soldiers marched down the street), that women and clergymen and
gardeners live longer than other people. Remove that protection, expose them to the
same exertions and activities, make them soldiers and sailors and engine-drivers and
dock labourers, and will not women die off so much younger, so much quicker, than
men that one will say, "I saw a woman to-day", as one used to say, "I saw an aeroplane".
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation, I
thought, opening the door. But what bearing has all this upon the subject of my paper,
Women and Fiction? I asked, going indoors.
 20

Chapter Three

It was disappointing not to have brought back in the evening some important statement,
some authentic fact. Women are poorer than men because--this or that. Perhaps now it
would be better to give up seeking for the truth, and receiving on one's head an
avalanche of opinion hot as lava, discoloured as dish-water. It would be better to draw
the curtains; to shut out distractions; to light the lamp; to narrow the enquiry and to ask
the historian, who records not opinions but facts, to describe under what conditions
women lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say in the time of Elizabeth.
For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature
when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the
conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is
not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's
web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often
the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang
there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the
edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by
incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to
grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.
I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down one of the latest,
Professor Trevelyan's History of England. Once more I looked up Women, found
"position of" and turned to the pages indicated. "Wife-beating," I read, "was a recognised
right of man, and was practised without shame by high as well as low.... Similarly," the
historian goes on, "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.... Betrothal often took place
while one or both of the parties was in the cradle, and marriage when they were
scarcely out of the nurses' charge." That was about 1470, soon after Chaucer's time. The
next reference to the position of women is some two hundred years later, in the time of
the Stuarts. "It was still the exception for women of the upper and middle class to
choose their own husbands, and when the husband had been assigned, he was lord and
master, so far at least as law and custom could make him. Yet even so," Professor
Trevelyan concludes, "neither Shakespeare's women nor those of authentic
seventeenth-century memoirs, like the Verneys and the Hutchinsons, seem wanting in
personality and character." Certainly, if we consider it, Cleopatra must have had a way
with her; Lady Macbeth, one would suppose, had a will of her own; Rosalind, one might
conclude, was an attractive girl. Professor Trevelyan is speaking no more than the truth
when he remarks that Shakespeare's women do not seem wanting in personality and
character. Not being a historian, one might go even further and say that women have
burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time--
Clytemnestra, Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phèdre, Cressida, Rosalind,
Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then among the prose writers:
Millamant, Clarissa, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenine, Emma Bovary, Madame de
Guermantes--the names flock to mind, nor do they recall women "lacking in personality
 21

and character." Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men,
one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and
mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a
man, some think even greater. 5 But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor
Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.
A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest
importance; practically she is completely insignificant. 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.
It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians first and the
poets afterwards--a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen
chopping up suet. But these monsters, however amusing to the imagination, have no
existence in fact. What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and
prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact--that she is
Mrs. Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but
not losing sight of fiction either--that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and
forces are coursing and flashing perpetually. The moment, however, that one tries this
method with the Elizabethan woman, one branch of illumination fails; one is held up by
the scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial
about her. History scarcely mentions her. And I turned to Professor Trevelyan again to
see what history meant to him. I found by looking at his chapter headings that it meant--
"The Manor Court and the Methods of Open-field Agriculture... The Cistercians and
Sheep-farming... The Crusades... The University... The House of Commons... The Hundred
Years' War... The Wars of the Roses... The Renaissance Scholars... The Dissolution of the
Monasteries... Agrarian and Religious Strife... The Origin of English Sea-power... The
Armada..." and so on. Occasionally an individual woman is mentioned, an Elizabeth, or a
Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible means could middle-class women with
nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the
great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian's view of the past.
Nor shall we find her in any collection of anecdotes. Aubrey hardly mentions her. She
never writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her
letters in existence. She left no plays or poems by which we can judge her. What one
wants, I thought--and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply
it?--is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a

5"It remains a strange and almost inexplicable fact that in Athena's city, where women were kept in
almost Oriental suppression as odalisques or drudges, the stage should yet have produced figures like
Clytemnestra and Cassandra Atossa and Antigone, Phèdre and Medea, and all the other heroines who
dominate play after play of the 'misogynist' Euripides. But the paradox of this world where in real life a
respectable woman could hardly show her face alone in the street, and yet on the stage woman equals or
surpasses man, has never been satisfactorily explained. In modern tragedy the same predominance exists.
At all events, a very cursory survey of Shakespeare's work (similarly with Webster, though not with
Marlowe or Jonson) suffices to reveal how this dominance, this initiative of women, persists from
Rosalind to Lady Macbeth. So too in Racine; six of his tragedies bear their heroines' names; and what male
characters of his shall we set against Hermione and Andromaque, Bérénice and Roxane, Phèdre and
Athalie? So again with Ibsen; what men shall we match with Solveig and Nora, Heda and Hilda Wangel and
Rebecca West?"--F. L. Lucas, Tragedy, pp. 114-15.
 22

rule; what was her house like; had she a room to herself; did she do the cooking; would
she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish
registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be
scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of it. It would be
ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about the shelves for books that were
not there, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that they should rewrite
history, though I own that it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided; but why
should they not add a supplement to history? calling it, of course, by some
inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without impropriety? For one
often catches a glimpse of them in the lives of the great, whisking away into the
background, concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear. And, after all,
we have lives enough of Jane Austen; it scarcely seems necessary to consider again the
influence of the tragedies of Joanna Baillie upon the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe; as for
myself, I should not mind if the homes and haunts of Mary Russell Mitford were closed
to the public for a century at least. But what I find deplorable, I continued, looking about
the bookshelves again, is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth
century. I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that. Here am I asking
why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they
were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms to
themselves; how many women had children before they were twenty-one; what, in
short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night. They had no money
evidently; according to Professor Trevelyan they were married whether they liked it or
not before they were out of the nursery, at fifteen or sixteen very likely. It would have
been extremely odd, even upon this showing, had one of them suddenly written the
plays of Shakespeare, I concluded, and I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now,
but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past,
present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it.
He also told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of
fact go to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those
old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their
approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.
Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on
the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible,
completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the
age of Shakespeare. Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have
happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.
Shakespeare himself went, very probably,--his mother was an heiress--to the grammar
school, where he may have learnt Latin--Ovid, Virgil and Horace--and the elements of
grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps
shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the
neighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent
him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by
holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a
successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing
everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even
getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let
us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see
the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning
grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now
 23

and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came
in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books
and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial
people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter--indeed,
more likely than not she was the apple of her father's eye. Perhaps she scribbled some
pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them.
Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a
neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that
she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her
instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give
her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How
could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone
drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope
one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that
sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift
like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She
stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The
manager--a fat, loose-lipped man--guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles
dancing and women acting--no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted--
you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her
dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and
lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways.
At last--for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the
same grey eyes and rounded brows--at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on
her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so--who shall measure the heat
and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?--killed
herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses
now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.
That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare's day
had had Shakespeare's genius. But for my part, I agree with the deceased bishop, if such
he was--it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's day should have had
Shakespeare's genius. For genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring,
uneducated, servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and the
Britons. It is not born to-day among the working classes. How, then, could it have been
born among women whose work began, according to Professor Trevelyan, almost
before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their parents and held to it
by all the power of law and custom? Yet genius of a sort must have existed among
women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily
Brontë or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got
itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman
possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man
who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet,
of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, 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. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many
poems without signing them, was often a woman. It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald, I
think, suggested who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to her
children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the winter's night.
 24

This may be true or it may be false--who can say?--but what is true in it, so it seemed to
me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare's sister as I had made it, is that 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. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted
girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered
by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she
must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could have walked to London
and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers
without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been
irrational--for chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown
reasons--but were none the less inevitable. Chastity had then, it has even now, a
religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and
instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.
To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a
woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well
have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted
and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination. And undoubtedly, I
thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have
gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense
of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century.
Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings
prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did
homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally
encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles,
himself a much-talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in
their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as
concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a
tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it, as
Alf, Bert or Chas. must do in obedience to their instinct, which murmurs if it sees a fine
woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien est à moi. And, of course, it may not be a dog, I
thought, remembering Parliament Square, the Sieges Allee and other avenues; it may be
a piece of land or a man with curly black hair. It is one of the great advantages of being a
woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an
Englishwoman of her.
That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an
unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself. All the conditions of her life, all her
own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is
in the brain. But what is the state of mind that is most propitious to the act of creation, I
asked? Can one come by any notion of the state that furthers and makes possible that
strange activity? Here I opened the volume containing the Tragedies of Shakespeare.
What was Shakespeare's state of mind, for instance, when he wrote Lear and Antony and
Cleopatra? It was certainly the state of mind most favourable to poetry that there has
ever existed. But Shakespeare himself said nothing about it. We only know casually and
by chance that he "never blotted a line". Nothing indeed was ever said by the artist
himself about his state of mind until the eighteenth century perhaps. Rousseau perhaps
began it. At any rate, by the nineteenth century self-consciousness had developed so far
that it was the habit for men of letters to describe their minds in confessions and
autobiographies. Their lives also were written, and their letters were printed after their
 25

deaths. Thus, though we do not know what Shakespeare went through when he
wrote Lear, we do know what Carlyle went through when he wrote the French
Revolution; what Flaubert went through when he wrote Madame Bovary; what Keats
was going through when he tried to write poetry against the coming of death and the
indifference of the world.
And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis
that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything
is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer's mind whole and entire.
Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt;
money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties
and making them harder to bear is the world's notorious indifference. It does not ask
people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care
whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or
that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats,
Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of
distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of
analysis and confession. "Mighty poets in their misery dead"--that is the burden of their
song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book
is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.
But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely
more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or
a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich
or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since her pin money,
which depended on the goodwill of her father, was only enough to keep her clothed, she
was debarred from such alleviations as came even to Keats or Tennyson or Carlyle, all
poor men, from a walking tour, a little journey to France, from the separate lodging
which, even if it were miserable enough, sheltered them from the claims and tyrannies
of their families. Such material difficulties were formidable; but much worse were the
immaterial. The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of
genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The
world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to
me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What's the good of your writing? Here the
psychologists of Newnham and Girton might come to our help, I thought, looking again
at the blank spaces on the shelves. For surely it is time that the effect of discouragement
upon the mind of the artist should be measured, as I have seen a dairy company
measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of the rat. They set
two rats in cages side by side, and of the two one was furtive, timid and small, and the
other was glossy, bold and big. Now what food do we feed women as artists upon? I
asked, remembering, I suppose, that dinner of prunes and custard. To answer that
question I had only to open the evening paper and to read that Lord Birkenhead is of
opinion--but really I am not going to trouble to copy out Lord Birkenhead's opinion
upon the writing of women. What Dean Inge says I will leave in peace. The Harley Street
specialist may be allowed to rouse the echoes of Harley Street with his vociferations
without raising a hair on my head. I will quote, however, Mr. Oscar Browning, because
Mr. Oscar Browning was a great figure in Cambridge at one time, and used to examine
the students at Girton and Newnham. Mr. Oscar Browning was wont to declare "that the
impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that,
irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior
 26

of the worst man". After saying that Mr. Browning went back to his rooms--and it is this
sequel that endears him and makes him a human figure of some bulk and majesty--he
went back to his rooms and found a stable-boy lying on the sofa--"a mere skeleton, his
cheeks were cavernous and sallow, his teeth were black, and he did not appear to have
the full use of his limbs.... 'That's Arthur' [said Mr. Browning]. 'He's a dear boy really and
most high-minded.'" The two pictures always seem to me to complete each other. And
happily in this age of biography the two pictures often do complete each other, so that
we are able to interpret the opinions of great men not only by what they say, but by
what they do.
But though this is possible now, such opinions coming from the lips of important people
must have been formidable enough even fifty years ago. Let us suppose that a father
from the highest motives did not wish his daughter to leave home and become writer,
painter or scholar. "See what Mr. Oscar Browning says," he would say; and there was
not only Mr. Oscar Browning; there was the Saturday Review; there was Mr. Greg--the
"essentials of a woman's being," said Mr. Greg emphatically, "are that they are supported
by, and they minister to, men"--there was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the
effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually. Even if her father did not
read out loud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading, even
in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and told profoundly upon her
work. There would always have been that assertion--you cannot do this, you are
incapable of doing that--to protest against, to overcome. Probably for a novelist this
germ is no longer of much effect; for there have been women novelists of merit. But for
painters it must still have some sting in it; and for musicians, I imagine, is even now
active and poisonous in the extreme. The woman composer stands where the actress
stood in the time of Shakespeare. Nick Greene, I thought, remembering the story I had
made about Shakespeare's sister, said that a woman acting put him in mind of a dog
dancing. Johnson repeated the phrase two hundred years later of women preaching.
And here, I said, opening a book about music, we have the very words used again in this
year of grace, 1928, of women who try to write music. "Of Mlle. Germaine Tailleferre
one can only repeat Dr. Johnson's dictum concerning a woman preacher, transposed
into terms of music. 'Sir, a woman's composing is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It
is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.'" 6 So accurately does history
repeat itself.
Thus, I concluded, shutting Mr. Oscar Browning's life and pushing away the rest, it is
fairly evident that even in the nineteenth century a woman was not encouraged to be an
artist. On the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted. Her mind must
have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving
that. For here again we come within range of that very interesting and obscure
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, even when the risk to himself seems infinitesimal and the suppliant
humble and devoted. Even Lady Bessborough, I remembered, with all her passion for
politics, must humbly bow herself and write to Lord Granville Leveson-Gower: "...
notwithstanding all my violence in politicks and talking so much on that subject, I
perfectly agree with you that no woman has any business to meddle with that or any

6 A Survey of Contemporary Music, Cecil Gray, p. 246.

 27

other serious business, farther than giving her opinion (if she is ask'd)." And so she goes
on to spend her enthusiasm where it meets with no obstacle whatsoever, upon that
immensely important subject, Lord Granville's maiden speech in the House of
Commons. The spectacle is certainly a strange one, I thought. The history of men's
opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that
emancipation itself. An amusing book might be made of it if some young student at
Girton or Newnham would collect examples and deduce a theory,--but she would need
thick gloves on her hands, and bars to protect her of solid gold.
But what is amusing now, I recollected, shutting Lady Bessborough, had to be taken in
desperate earnest once. Opinions that one now pastes in a book labelled cock-a-doodle-
dum and keeps for reading to select audiences on summer nights once drew tears, I can
assure you. Among your grandmothers and great-grandmothers there were many that
wept their eyes out. Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony. 7 Moreover, it is
all very well for you, who have got yourselves to college and enjoy sitting-rooms--or is it
only bed-sitting-rooms?--of your own to say that genius should disregard such opinions;
that genius should be above caring what is said of it. Unfortunately, it is precisely the
men or women of genius who mind most what is said of them. Remember Keats.
Remember the words he had cut on his tombstone. Think of Tennyson; think--but I need
hardly multiply instances of the undeniable, if very unfortunate, fact that it is the nature
of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the
wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate, I thought, returning again to my
original enquiry into what state of mind is most propitious for creative work, because
the mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and
entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare's mind, I
conjectured, looking at the book which lay open at Antony and Cleopatra. There must be
no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.
For though we say that we know nothing about Shakespeare's state of mind, even as we
say that, we are saying something about Shakespeare's state of mind. The reason
perhaps why we know so little of Shakespeare--compared with Donne or Ben Jonson or
Milton--is that his grudges and spites and antipathies are hidden from us. We are not
held up by some "revelation" which reminds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to
preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some
hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows
from him free and unimpeded. If ever a human being got his work expressed
completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought,
turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare's mind.

7 See Cassandra, by Florence Nightingale, printed in The Cause, by R. Strachey.

 28

Chapter Four

That one would find any woman in that state of mind in the sixteenth century was
obviously impossible. One has only to think of the Elizabethan tombstones with all those
children kneeling with clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses
with their dark, cramped rooms, to realise that no woman could have written poetry
then. What one would expect to find would be that rather later perhaps some great lady
would take advantage of her comparative freedom and comfort to publish something
with her name to it and risk being thought a monster. Men, of course, are not snobs, I
continued, carefully eschewing "the arrant feminism" of Miss Rebecca West; but they
appreciate with sympathy for the most part the efforts of a countess to write verse. One
would expect to find a lady of title meeting with far greater encouragement than an
unknown Miss Austen or a Miss Brontë at that time would have met with. But one
would also expect to find that her mind was disturbed by alien emotions like fear and
hatred and that her poems showed traces of that disturbance. Here is Lady Winchilsea,
for example, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year 1661; she was
noble both by birth and by marriage; she was childless; she wrote poetry, and one has
only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of
women:
How are we fallen! fallen by mistaken rules,
And Education's more than Nature's fools;
Debarred from all improvements of the mind,
And to be dull, expected and designed;
And if someone would soar above the rest,
With warmer fancy, and ambition pressed,
So strong the opposing faction still appears,
The hopes to thrive can ne'er outweigh the fears.
Clearly her mind has by no means "consumed all impediments and become
incandescent". On the contrary, it is harassed and distracted with hates and grievances.
The human race is split up for her into two parties. Men are the "opposing faction"; men
are hated and feared, because they have the power to bar her way to what she wants to
do--which is to write.
Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,
Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed,
The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.
They tell us we mistake our sex and way;
Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play,
Are the accomplishments we should desire;
To write, or read, or think, or to enquire,
Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,
And interrupt the conquests of our prime,
Whilst the dull manage of a servile house
Is held by some our utmost art and use.
 29

Indeed she has to encourage herself to write by supposing that what she writes will
never be published; to soothe herself with the sad chant:
To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing,
For groves of laurel thou wert never meant;
Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.
Yet it is clear that could she have freed her mind from hate and fear and not heaped it
with bitterness and resentment, the fire was hot within her. Now and again words issue
of pure poetry:
Nor will in fading silks compose,
Faintly the inimitable rose.
--they are rightly praised by Mr. Murry, and Pope, it is thought, remembered and
appropriated those others:
Now the jonquille o'ercomes the feeble brain;
We faint beneath the aromatic pain.
It was a thousand pities that the woman who could write like that, whose mind was
tuned to nature and reflection, should have been forced to anger and bitterness. But
how could she have helped herself? I asked, imagining the sneers and the laughter, the
adulation of the toadies, the scepticism of the professional poet. She must have shut
herself up in a room in the country to write, and been torn asunder by bitterness and
scruples perhaps, though her husband was of the kindest, and their married life
perfection. She "must have", I say, because when one comes to seek out the facts about
Lady Winchilsea, one finds, as usual, that almost nothing is known about her. She
suffered terribly from melancholy, which we can explain at least to some extent when
we find her telling us how in the grip of it she would imagine:
My lines decried, and my employment thought
An useless folly or presumptuous fault:
The employment, which was thus censured, was, as far as one can see, the harmless one
of rambling about the fields and dreaming:
My hand delights to trace unusual things,
And deviates from the known and common way,
Nor will in fading silks compose,
Faintly the inimitable rose.
Naturally, if that was her habit and that was her delight, she could only expect to be
laughed at; and, accordingly, Pope or Gay is said to have satirised her "as a blue-stocking
with an itch for scribbling". Also it is thought that she offended Gay by laughing at him.
She said that his Trivia showed that "he was more proper to walk before a chair than to
ride in one". But this is all "dubious gossip" and, says Mr. Murry, "uninteresting". But
there I do not agree with him, for I should have liked to have had more even of dubious
gossip so that I might have found out or made up some image of this melancholy lady,
who loved wandering in the fields and thinking about unusual things and scorned, so
rashly, so unwisely, "the dull manage of a servile house". But she became diffuse, Mr.
Murry says. Her gift is all grown about with weeds and bound with briars. It had no
chance of showing itself for the fine distinguished gift it was. And so, putting her back on
the shelf, I turned to the other great lady, the Duchess whom Lamb loved, hare-brained,
fantastical Margaret of Newcastle, her elder, but her contemporary. They were very
 30

different, but alike in this that both were noble and both childless, and both were
married to the best of husbands. In both burnt the same passion for poetry and both are
disfigured and deformed by the same causes. Open the Duchess and one finds the same
outburst of rage, "Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like
Worms...." Margaret too might have been a poet; in our day all that activity would have
turned a wheel of some sort. As it was, what could bind, tame or civilise for human use
that wild, generous, untutored intelligence? It poured itself out, higgledy-piggledy, in
torrents of rhyme and prose, poetry and philosophy which stand congealed in quartos
and folios that nobody ever reads. She should have had a microscope put in her hand.
She should have been taught to look at the stars and reason scientifically. Her wits were
turned with solitude and freedom. No one checked her. No one taught her. The
professors fawned on her. At Court they jeered at her. Sir Egerton Brydges complained
of her coarseness--"as flowing from a female of high rank brought up in the Courts". She
shut herself up at Welbeck alone.
What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind!
as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the
garden and choked them to death. What a waste that the woman who wrote "the best
bred women are those whose minds are civilest" should have frittered her time away
scribbling nonsense and plunging ever deeper into obscurity and folly till the people
crowded round her coach when she issued out. Evidently the crazy Duchess became a
bogey to frighten clever girls with. Here, I remembered, putting away the Duchess and
opening Dorothy Osborne's letters, is Dorothy writing to Temple about the Duchess's
new book. "Sure the poore woman is a little distracted, shee could never bee soe
rediculous else as to venture at writeing book's and in verse too, if I should not sleep
this fortnight I should not come to that."
And so, since no woman of sense and modesty could write books, Dorothy, who was
sensitive and melancholy, the very opposite of the Duchess in temper, wrote nothing.
Letters did not count. A woman might write letters while she was sitting by her father's
sick-bed. She could write them by the fire whilst the men talked without disturbing
them. The strange thing is, I thought, turning over the pages of Dorothy's letters, what a
gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning
of a scene. Listen to her running on:
"After dinner wee sitt and talk till Mr. B. com's in question and then I am gon. the heat of
the day is spent in reading or working and about sixe or seven a Clock, I walke out into a
Common that lyes hard by the house where a great many young wenches keep Sheep
and Cow's and sitt in the shades singing of Ballads; I goe to them and compare their
voyces and Beauty's to some Ancient Shepherdesses that I have read of and finde a
vaste difference there, but trust mee I think these are as innocent as those could bee. I
talke to them, and finde they want nothing to make them the happiest People in the
world, but the knoledge that they are soe. most commonly when we are in the middest
of our discourse one looks aboute her and spyes her Cow's goeing into the Corne and
then away they all run, as if they had wing's at theire heels. I that am not soe nimble stay
behinde, and when I see them driveing home theire Cattle I think tis time for mee to
retyre too. when I have supped I goe into the Garden and soe to the syde of a small River
that runs by it where I sitt downe and wish you with mee...."
One could have sworn that she had the makings of a writer in her. But "if I should not
sleep this fortnight I should not come to that"--one can measure the opposition that was
 31

in the air to a woman writing when one finds that even a woman with a great turn for
writing has brought herself to believe that to write a book was to be ridiculous, even to
show oneself distracted. And so we come, I continued, replacing the single short volume
of Dorothy Osborne's letters upon the shelf, to Mrs. Behn.
And with Mrs. Behn we turn a very important corner on the road. We leave behind, shut
up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without
audience or criticism, for their own delight alone. We come to town and rub shoulders
with ordinary people in the streets. Mrs. Behn was a middle-class woman with all the
plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage; a woman forced by the death of her
husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits.
She had to work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard, enough to
live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote, even the
splendid "A Thousand Martyrs I have made", or "Love in Fantastic Triumph sat", for
here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time
the mind will be free to write what it likes. For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls
could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money
by my pen. Of course the answer for many years to come was, Yes, by living the life of
Aphra Behn! Death would be better! and the door was slammed faster than ever. That
profoundly interesting subject, the value that men set upon women's chastity and its
effect upon their education, here suggests itself for discussion, and might provide an
interesting book if any student at Girton or Newnham cared to go into the matter. Lady
Dudley, sitting in diamonds among the midges of a Scottish moor, might serve for
frontispiece. Lord Dudley, The Times said when Lady Dudley died the other day, "a man
of cultivated taste and many accomplishments, was benevolent and bountiful, but
whimsically despotic. He insisted upon his wife's wearing full dress, even at the
remotest shooting-lodge in the Highlands; he loaded her with gorgeous jewels", and so
on, "he gave her everything--always excepting any measure of responsibility". Then
Lord Dudley had a stroke and she nursed him and ruled his estates with supreme
competence for ever after. That whimsical despotism was in the nineteenth century too.
But to return. Aphra Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice,
perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became not merely a
sign of folly and a distracted mind, but was of practical importance. A husband might
die, or some disaster overtake the family. Hundreds of women began as the eighteenth
century drew on to add to their pin money, or to come to the rescue of their families by
making translations or writing the innumerable bad novels which have ceased to be
recorded even in text-books, but are to be picked up in the fourpenny boxes in the
Charing Cross Road. The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later
eighteenth century among women--the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays
on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics--was founded on the solid fact that
women could make money by writing. Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. It
might still be well to sneer at "blue stockings with an itch for scribbling", but it could not
be denied that they could put money in their purses. Thus, towards the end of the
eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should
describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of
the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write. For if Pride and Prejudice matters,
and Middlemarch and Villette and Wuthering Heights matter, then it matters far more
than I can prove in an hour's discourse that women generally, and not merely the lonely
aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers, took to
 32

writing. Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could
no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or
Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the
ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and
solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking
by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot
done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter--the valiant old woman who tied a bell
to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek. All women together
ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but
rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to
speak their minds. It is she--shady and amorous as she was--who makes it not quite
fantastic for me to say to you to-night: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.
Here, then, one had reached the early nineteenth century. And here, for the first time, I
found several shelves given up entirely to the works of women. But why, I could not
help asking, as I ran my eyes over them, were they, with very few exceptions, all novels?
The original impulse was to poetry. The "supreme head of song" was a poetess. Both in
France and in England the women poets precede the women novelists. Moreover, I
thought, looking at the four famous names, what had George Eliot in common with
Emily Brontë? Did not Charlotte Brontë fail entirely to understand Jane Austen? Save for
the possibly relevant fact that not one of them had a child, four more incongruous
characters could not have met together in a room--so much so that it is tempting to
invent a meeting and a dialogue between them. Yet by some strange force they were all
compelled when they wrote, to write novels. Had it something to do with being born of
the middle class, I asked; and with the fact, which Miss Emily Davies a little later was so
strikingly to demonstrate, that the middle-class family in the early nineteenth century
was possessed only of a single sitting-room between them? If a woman wrote, she
would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so
vehemently to complain,--"women never have an half hour... that they can call their
own"--she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction
there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required. Jane Austen wrote
like that to the end of her days. "How she was able to effect all this," her nephew writes
in his Memoir, "is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the
work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual
interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants
or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party". 8 Jane Austen hid her
manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper. Then, again, all the literary
training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the
observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated
for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room. People's feelings were
impressed on her; personal relations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the
middle-class woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels, even though, as seems
evident enough, two of the four famous women here named were not by nature
novelists. Emily Brontë should have written poetic plays; the overflow of George Eliot's
capacious mind should have spread itself when the creative impulse was spent upon
history or biography. They wrote novels, however; one may even go further, I said,
taking Pride and Prejudice from the shelf, and say that they wrote good novels. Without

8 Memoir of Jane Austen, by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh

 33

boasting or giving pain to the opposite sex, one may say that Pride and Prejudice is a
good book. At any rate, one would not have been ashamed to have been caught in the act
of writing Pride and Prejudice. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she
might hide her manuscript before anyone came in. To Jane Austen there was something
discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice. And, I wondered, would Pride and
Prejudice have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide
her manuscript from visitors? I read a page or two to see; but I could not find any signs
that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the
chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate,
without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how
Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people
compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had
consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do
not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she
wrote, and so does Shakespeare. If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her
circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her. It was
impossible for a woman to go about alone. She never travelled; she never drove through
London in an omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the
nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her gift and her circumstances
matched each other completely. But I doubt whether that was true of Charlotte Brontë, I
said, opening Jane Eyre and laying it beside Pride and Prejudice.
I opened it at chapter twelve and my eye was caught by the phrase "Anybody may blame
me who likes". What were they blaming Charlotte Brontë for? I wondered. And I read
how Jane Eyre used to go up on to the roof when Mrs. Fairfax was making jellies and
looked over the fields at the distant view. And then she longed--and it was for this that
they blamed her--that "then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that
limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but
never seen: that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of
intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character than was here
within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and what was good in Adèle;
but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I
believed in I wished to behold.
"Who blames me? Many, no doubt, and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it:
the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes....
"It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have
action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller
doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how
many rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed
to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their
faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too
rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is
narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to
confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano
and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek
to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
"When thus alone I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole's laugh...."
 34

That is an awkward break, I thought. It is upsetting to come upon Grace Poole all of a
sudden. The continuity is disturbed. One might say, I continued, laying the book down
beside Pride and Prejudice, that the woman who wrote those pages had more genius in
her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that
indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her
books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write
calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself
where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help
but die young, cramped and thwarted?
One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if
Charlotte Brontë had possessed say three hundred a year--but the foolish woman sold
the copyright of her novels outright for fifteen hundred pounds; had somehow
possessed more knowledge of the busy world, and towns and regions full of life; more
practical experience, and intercourse with her kind and acquaintance with a variety of
character. In those words she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects as a
novelist but upon those of her sex at that time. She knew, no one better, how
enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions
over distant fields; if experience and intercourse and travel had been granted her. But
they were not granted; they were withheld; and we must accept the fact that all those
good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, were written by women
without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman;
written too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so
poor that they could not afford to buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon
which to write Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. One of them, it is true, George Eliot,
escaped after much tribulation, but only to a secluded villa in St. John's Wood. And there
she settled down in the shadow of the world's disapproval. "I wish it to be understood",
she wrote, "that I should never invite anyone to come and see me who did not ask for
the invitation"; for was she not living in sin with a married man and might not the sight
of her damage the chastity of Mrs. Smith or whoever it might be that chanced to call?
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; going to the wars; 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. Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in seclusion with a
married lady "cut off from what is called the world", however edifying the moral lesson,
he could scarcely, I thought, have written War and Peace.
But one could perhaps go a little deeper into the question of novel-writing and the effect
of sex upon the novelist. If one shuts one's eyes and thinks of the novel as a whole, it
would seem to be a creation owning a certain looking-glass likeness to life, though of
course with simplifications and distortions innumerable. At any rate, it is a structure
leaving a shape on the mind's eye, built now in squares, now pagoda shaped, now
throwing out wings and arcades, now solidly compact and domed like the Cathedral of
Saint Sofia at Constantinople. This shape, I thought, thinking back over certain famous
novels, starts in one the kind of emotion that is appropriate to it. But that emotion at
once blends itself with others, for the "shape" is not made by the relation of stone to
stone, but by the relation of human being to human being. Thus a novel starts in us all
sorts of antagonistic and opposed emotions. Life conflicts with something that is not life.
Hence the difficulty of coming to any agreement about novels, and the immense sway
 35

that our private prejudices have upon us. On the one hand, we feel You--John the hero--
must live, or I shall be in the depths of despair. On the other, we feel, Alas, John, you
must die, because the shape of the book requires it. Life conflicts with something that is
not life. Then since life it is in part, we judge it as life. James is the sort of man I most
detest, one says. Or, This is a farrago of absurdity. I could never feel anything of the sort
myself. The whole structure, it is obvious, thinking back on any famous novel, is one of
infinite complexity, because it is thus made up of so many different judgements, of so
many different kinds of emotion. The wonder is that any book so composed holds
together for more than a year or two, or can possibly mean to the English reader what it
means for the Russian or the Chinese. But they do hold together occasionally very
remarkably. And what holds them together in these rare instances of survival (I was
thinking of War and Peace) is something that one calls integrity, though it has nothing to
do with paying one's bills or behaving honourably in an emergency. What one means by
integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the
truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never
known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens.
One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one reads--for Nature seems, very
oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist's
integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood,
has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great
artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become
visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this
is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement,
and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something very
precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts it back on the shelf, I said,
taking War and Peace and putting it back in its place. If, on the other hand, these poor
sentences that one takes and tests rouse first a quick and eager response with their
bright colouring and their dashing gestures but there they stop: something seems to
check them in their development: or if they bring to light only a faint scribble in that
corner and a blot over there, and nothing appears whole and entire, then one heaves a
sigh of disappointment and says, Another failure. This novel has come to grief
somewhere.
And for the most part, of course, novels do come to grief somewhere. The imagination
falters under the enormous strain. The insight is confused; it can no longer distinguish
between the true and the false; it has no longer the strength to go on with the vast
labour that calls at every moment for the use of so many different faculties. But how
would all this be affected by the sex of the novelist, I wondered, looking at Jane Eyre and
the others. Would the fact of her sex in any way interfere with the integrity of a woman
novelist--that integrity which I take to be the backbone of the writer? Now, in the
passages I have quoted from Jane Eyre, it is clear that anger was tampering with the
integrity of Charlotte Brontë the novelist. She left her story, to which her entire devotion
was due, to attend to some personal grievance. She remembered that she had been
starved of her proper due of experience--she had been made to stagnate in a parsonage
mending stockings when she wanted to wander free over the world. Her imagination
swerved from indignation and we feel it swerve. But there were many more influences
than anger tugging at her imagination and deflecting it from its path. Ignorance, for
instance. The portrait of Rochester is drawn in the dark. We feel the influence of fear in
it; just as we constantly feel an acidity which is the result of oppression, a buried
 36

suffering smouldering beneath her passion, a rancour which contracts those books,
splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain.
And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent
those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the
values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the
masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the
worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial". And these values are inevitably
transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it
deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women
in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop--
everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists. The whole structure,
therefore, of the early nineteenth-century novel was raised, if one was a woman, by a
mind which was slightly pulled from the straight, and made to alter its clear vision in
deference to external authority. One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and
listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was
meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of
conciliation. She was admitting that she was "only a woman", or protesting that she was
"as good as a man". She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility
and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was
thinking of something other than the thing itself. Down comes her book upon our heads.
There was a flaw in the centre of it. And I thought of all the women's novels that lie
scattered, like small pock-marked apples in an orchard, about the second-hand book
shops of London. It was the flaw in the centre that had rotted them. She had altered her
values in deference to the opinion of others.
But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right or to the
left. What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the
midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without
shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the
finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand
women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions
of the eternal pedagogue--write this, think that. They alone were deaf to that persistent
voice, now grumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked,
now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at
them, like some too conscientious governess, adjuring them, like Sir Egerton Brydges, to
be refined; dragging even into the criticism of poetry criticism of sex; 9 admonishing
them, if they would be good and win, as I suppose, some shiny prize, to keep within
certain limits which the gentleman in question thinks suitable--"... female novelists
should only aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations of their
sex". 10 That puts the matter in a nutshell, and when I tell you, rather to your surprise,
that this sentence was written not in August 1828 but in August 1928, you will agree, I
think, that however delightful it is to us now, it represents a vast body of opinion--I am
not going to stir those old pools; I take only what chance has floated to my feet--that

9 "[She] has a metaphysical purpose, and that is a dangerous obsession, especially with a woman, for
women rarely possess men's healthy love of rhetoric. It is a strange lack in the sex which is in other things
more primitive and more materialistic."--New Criterion, June 1928.
10 "If, like the reporter, you believe that female novelists should only aspire to excellence by courageously

acknowledging the limitations of their sex (Jane Austen [has] demonstrated how gracefully this gesture
can be accomplished ...)."--Life and Letters, August 1928.
 37

was far more vigorous and far more vocal a century ago. It would have needed a very
stalwart young woman in 1828 to disregard all those snubs and chidings and promises
of prizes. One must have been something of a firebrand to say to oneself, Oh, but they
can't buy literature too. Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle
though you are, to turn me off the grass.
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.
But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon their writing--and I believe
that they had a very great effect--that was unimportant compared with the other
difficulty which faced them (I was still considering those early nineteenth-century
novelists) when they came to set their thoughts on paper--that is that they had no
tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help. For we think
back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers
for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure. Lamb, Browne, Thackeray,
Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De Quincey--whoever it may be--never helped a woman yet,
though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use. The
weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift
anything substantial from him successfully. The ape is too distant to be sedulous.
Perhaps the first thing she would find, setting pen to paper, was that there was no
common sentence ready for her use. All the great novelists like Thackeray and Dickens
and Balzac have written a natural prose, swift but not slovenly, expressive but not
precious, taking their own tint without ceasing to be common property. They have
based it on the sentence that was current at the time. The sentence that was current at
the beginning of the nineteenth century ran something like this perhaps: "The grandeur
of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could
have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless
generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates
success." That is a man's sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It
was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman's use. Charlotte Brontë, with all her
splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George
Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and
laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use
and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she
got infinitely more said. Indeed, since freedom and fullness of expression are of the
essence of the art, such a lack of tradition, such a scarcity and inadequacy of tools, must
have told enormously upon the writing of women. Moreover, a book is not made of
sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or
domes. And this shape too has been made by men out of their own needs for their own
uses. There is no reason to think that the form of the epic or of the poetic play suit a
woman any more than the sentence suits her. But all the older forms of literature were
hardened and set by the time she became a writer. The novel alone was young enough
to be soft in her hands--another reason, perhaps, why she wrote novels. Yet who shall
say that even now "the novel" (I give it inverted commas to mark my sense of the words'
inadequacy), who shall say that even this most pliable of all forms is rightly shaped for
her use? No doubt we shall find her knocking that into shape for herself when she has
the free use of her limbs; and providing some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for
the poetry in her. For it is the poetry that is still denied outlet. And I went on to ponder
 38

how a woman nowadays would write a poetic tragedy in five acts. Would she use
verse?--would she not use prose rather?
But these are difficult questions which lie in the twilight of the future. I must leave them,
if only because they stimulate me to wander from my subject into trackless forests
where I shall be lost and, very likely, devoured by wild beasts. I do not want, and I am
sure that you do not want me, to broach that very dismal subject, the future of fiction, so
that I will only pause here one moment to draw your attention to the great part which
must be played in that future so far as women are concerned by physical conditions. The
book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that
women's books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so
that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions
there will always be. Again, the nerves that feed the brain would seem to differ in men
and women, and if you are going to make them work their best and hardest, you must
find out what treatment suits them--whether these hours of lectures, for instance, which
the monks devised, presumably, hundreds of years ago, suit them--what alternations of
work and rest they need, interpreting rest not as doing nothing but as doing something
but something that is different; and what should that difference be? All this should be
discussed and discovered; all this is part of the question of women and fiction. And yet, I
continued, approaching the bookcase again, where shall I find that elaborate study of
the psychology of women by a woman? If through their incapacity to play football
women are not going to be allowed to practise medicine----
Happily my thoughts were now given another turn.
 39

Chapter Five

I had come at last, in the course of this rambling, to the shelves which hold books by the
living; by women and by men; for there are almost as many books written by women
now as by men. Or if that is not yet quite true, if the male is still the voluble sex, it is
certainly true that women no longer write novels solely. There are Jane Harrison's
books on Greek archaeology; Vernon Lee's books on aesthetics; Gertrude Bell's books
on Persia. There are books on all sorts of subjects which a generation ago no woman
could have touched. There are poems and plays and criticism; there are histories and
biographies, books of travel and books of scholarship and research; there are even a few
philosophies and books about science and economics. And though novels predominate,
novels themselves may very well have changed from association with books of a
different feather. The natural simplicity, the epic age of women's writing, may have
gone. Reading and criticism may have given her a wider range, a greater subtlety. The
impulse towards autobiography may be spent. She may be beginning to use writing as
an art, not as a method of self-expression. Among these new novels one might find an
answer to several such questions.
I took down one of them at random. It stood at the very end of the shelf, was called Life's
Adventure, or some such title, by Mary Carmichael, and was published in this very
month of October. It seems to be her first book, I said to myself, but one must read it as
if it were the last volume in a fairly long series, continuing all those other books that I
have been glancing at--Lady Winchilsea's poems and Aphra Behn's plays and the novels
of the four great novelists. For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging
them separately. And I must also consider her--this unknown woman--as the
descendant of all those other women whose circumstances I have been glancing at and
see what she inherits of their characteristics and restrictions. So, with a sigh, because
novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers
instead of rousing one with a burning brand, I settled down with a notebook and a
pencil to make what I could of Mary Carmichael's first novel, Life's Adventure.
To begin with, I ran my eye up and down the page. I am going to get the hang of her
sentences first, I said, before I load my memory with blue eyes and brown and the
relationship that there may be between Chloe and Roger. There will be time for that
when I have decided whether she has a pen in her hand or a pickaxe. So I tried a
sentence or two on my tongue. Soon it was obvious that something was not quite in
order. The smooth gliding of sentence after sentence was interrupted. Something tore,
something scratched; a single word here and there flashed its torch in my eyes. She was
"unhanding" herself as they say in the old plays. She is like a person striking a match
that will not light, I thought. But why, I asked her as if she were present, are Jane
Austen's sentences not of the right shape for you? Must they all be scrapped because
Emma and Mr. Woodhouse are dead? Alas, I sighed, that it should be so. For while Jane
Austen breaks from melody to melody as Mozart from song to song, to read this writing
was like being out at sea in an open boat. Up one went, down one sank. This terseness,
this short-windedness, might mean that she was afraid of something; afraid of being
called "sentimental" perhaps; or she remembers that women's writing has been called
 40

flowery and so provides a superfluity of thorns; but until I have read a scene with some
care, I cannot be sure whether she is being herself or someone else. At any rate, she
does not lower one's vitality, I thought, reading more carefully. But she is heaping up
too many facts. She will not be able to use half of them in a book of this size. (It was
about half the length of Jane Eyre.) However, by some means or other she succeeded in
getting us all--Roger, Chloe, Olivia, Tony and Mr. Bigham--in a canoe up the river. Wait a
moment, I said, leaning back in my chair, I must consider the whole thing more carefully
before I go any further.
I am almost sure, I said to myself, that Mary Carmichael is playing a trick on us. For I feel
as one feels on a switchback railway when the car, instead of sinking, as one has been
led to expect, swerves up again. Mary is tampering with the expected sequence. First she
broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence. Very well, she has every right to
do both these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of
creating. Which of the two it is I cannot be sure until she has faced herself with a
situation. I will give her every liberty, I said, to choose what that situation shall be; she
shall make it of tin cans and old kettles if she likes; but she must convince me that she
believes it to be a situation; and then when she has made it she must face it. She must
jump. And, determined to do my duty by her as reader if she would do her duty by me as
writer, I turned the page and read... I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no
men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the figure of
Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell
you that the very next words I read were these--"Chloe liked Olivia..." Do not start. Do
not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes
happen. Sometimes women do like women.
"Chloe liked Olivia," I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there.
Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia.
And how completely Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered had she done so! As
it is, I thought, letting my mind, I am afraid, wander a little from Life's Adventure, the
whole thing is simplified, conventionalised, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra's
only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do
her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if
the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these
relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of
fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to
remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as
friends. There is an attempt at it in Diana of the Crossways. They are confidantes, of
course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and
daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was
strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not
only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. 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 rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. Hence,
perhaps, the peculiar nature of women in fiction; the astonishing extremes of her beauty
and horror; her alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity--for so a
lover would see her as his love rose or sank, was prosperous or unhappy. This is not so
true of the nineteenth-century novelists, of course. Woman becomes much more various
and complicated there. Indeed it was the desire to write about women perhaps that led
men by degrees to abandon the poetic drama which, with its violence, could make so
 41

little use of them, and to devise the novel as a more fitting receptacle. Even so it remains
obvious, even in the writing of Proust, that a man is terribly hampered and partial in his
knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men.
Also, I continued, looking down at the page again, it is becoming evident that women,
like men, have other interests besides the perennial interests of domesticity. "Chloe
liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together...." I read on and discovered that these
two young women were engaged in mincing liver, which is, it seems, a cure for
pernicious anæmia; although one of them was married and had--I think I am right in
stating--two small children. Now all that, of course, has had to be left out, and thus the
splendid portrait of the fictitious woman is much too simple and much too monotonous.
Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of
women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts
in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We
might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no
Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques--literature would be incredibly impoverished, as
indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut
upon women. Married against their will, kept in one room, and to one occupation, how
could a dramatist give a full or interesting or truthful account of them? Love was the
only possible interpreter. 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.
Now if Chloe likes Olivia and they share a laboratory, which of itself will make their
friendship more varied and lasting because it will be less personal; if Mary Carmichael
knows how to write, and I was beginning to enjoy some quality in her style; if she has a
room to herself, of which I am not quite sure; if she has five hundred a year of her own--
but that remains to be proved--then I think that something of great importance has
happened.
For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a
torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been. It is all half lights and profound
shadows like those serpentine caves where one goes with a candle peering up and
down, not knowing where one is stepping. And I began to read the book again, and read
how Chloe watched Olivia put a jar on a shelf and say how it was time to go home to her
children. That is a sight that has never been seen since the world began, I exclaimed.
And I watched too, very curiously. For I wanted to see how Mary Carmichael set to work
to catch those unrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half-said words, which form
themselves, no more palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women
are alone, unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex. She will need to
hold her breath, I said, reading on, if she is to do it; for women are so suspicious of any
interest that has not some obvious motive behind it, so terribly accustomed to
concealment and suppression, that they are off at the flicker of an eye turned
observingly in their direction. The only way for you to do it, I thought, addressing Mary
Carmichael as if she were there, would be to talk of something else, looking steadily out
of the window, and thus note, not with a pencil in a notebook, but in the shortest of
shorthand, in words that are hardly syllabled yet, what happens when Olivia--this
organism that has been under the shadow of the rock these million years--feels the light
fall on it, and sees coming her way a piece of strange food--knowledge, adventure, art.
And she reaches out for it, I thought, again raising my eyes from the page, and has to
devise some entirely new combination of her resources, so highly developed for other
 42

purposes, so as to absorb the new into the old without disturbing the infinitely intricate
and elaborate balance of the whole.
But, alas, I had done what I had determined not to do; I had slipped unthinkingly into
praise of my own sex. "Highly developed"--"infinitely intricate"--such are undeniably
terms of praise, and to praise one's own sex is always suspect, often silly; moreover, in
this case, how could one justify it? One could not go to the map and say Columbus
discovered America and Columbus was a woman; or take an apple and remark, Newton
discovered the laws of gravitation and Newton was a woman; or look into the sky and
say aeroplanes are flying overhead and aeroplanes were invented by women. There is
no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women. There are no yard
measures, neatly divided into the fractions of an inch, that one can lay against the
qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter, or the fidelity of a sister, or the
capacity of a housekeeper. Few women even now have been graded at the universities;
the great trials of the professions, army and navy, trade, politics and diplomacy have
hardly tested them. They remain even at this moment almost unclassified. But if I want
to know all that a human being can tell me about Sir Hawley Butts, for instance, I have
only to open Burke or Debrett and I shall find that he took such and such a degree; owns
a hall; has an heir; was Secretary to a Board; represented Great Britain in Canada; and
has received a certain number of degrees, offices, medals and other distinctions by
which his merits are stamped upon him indelibly. Only Providence can know more
about Sir Hawley Butts than that.
When, therefore, I say "highly developed", "infinitely intricate" of women, I am unable to
verify my words either in Whitaker, Debrett or the University Calendar. In this
predicament what can I do? And I looked at the bookcase again. There were the
biographies: Johnson and Goethe and Carlyle and Sterne and Cowper and Shelley and
Voltaire and Browning and many others. And I began thinking of all those great men
who have for one reason or another admired, sought out, lived with, confided in, made
love to, written of, trusted in, and shown what can only be described as some need of
and dependence upon certain persons of the opposite sex. That all these relationships
were absolutely Platonic I would not affirm, and Sir William Joynson Hicks would
probably deny. But we should wrong these illustrious men very greatly if we insisted
that they got nothing from these alliances but comfort, flattery and the pleasures of the
body. What they got, it is obvious, was something that their own sex was unable to
supply; and it would not be rash, perhaps, to define it further, without quoting the
doubtless rhapsodical words of the poets, as some stimulus, some renewal of creative
power which is in the gift only of the opposite sex to bestow. He would open the door of
drawing-room or nursery, I thought, and find her among her children perhaps, or with a
piece of embroidery on her knee--at any rate, the centre of some different order and
system of life, and the contrast between this world and his own, which might be the law
courts or the House of Commons, would at once refresh and invigorate; and there would
follow, even in the simplest talk, such a natural difference of opinion that the dried ideas
in him would be fertilised anew; and the sight of her creating in a different medium
from his own would so quicken his creative power that insensibly his sterile mind
would begin to plot again, and he would find the phrase or the scene which was lacking
when he put on his hat to visit her. Every Johnson has his Thrale, and holds fast to her
for some such reasons as these, and when the Thrale marries her Italian music master
Johnson goes half mad with rage and disgust, not merely that he will miss his pleasant
evenings at Streatham, but that the light of his life will be "as if gone out".
 43

And without being Dr. Johnson or Goethe or Carlyle or Voltaire, one may feel, though
very differently from these great men, the nature of this intricacy and the power of this
highly developed creative faculty among women. One goes into the room--but the
resources of the English language would be much put to the stretch, and whole flights of
words would need to wing their way illegitimately into existence before a woman could
say what happens when she goes into a room. The rooms differ so completely; they are
calm or thunderous; open on to the sea, or, on the contrary, give on to a prison yard; are
hung with washing; or alive with opals and silks; are hard as horsehair or soft as
feathers--one has only to go into any room in any street for the whole of that extremely
complex force of femininity to fly in one's face. How should it be otherwise? For women
have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are
permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of
bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business
and politics. But this creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men. And
one must conclude that it would be a thousand pities if it were hindered or wasted, for it
was won by centuries of the most drastic discipline, and there is nothing to take its
place. 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 fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much
likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes
looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater
service to humanity; and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of
watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself "superior".
Mary Carmichael, I thought, still hovering at a little distance above the page, will have
her work cut out for her merely as an observer. I am afraid indeed that she will be
tempted to become, what I think the less interesting branch of the species--the
naturalist-novelist, and not the contemplative. There are so many new facts for her to
observe. She will not need to limit herself any longer to the respectable houses of the
upper middle classes. She will go without kindness or condescension, but in the spirit of
fellowship, into those small, scented rooms where sit the courtesan, the harlot and the
lady with the pug dog. There they still sit in the rough and ready-made clothes that the
male writer has had perforce to clap upon their shoulders. But Mary Carmichael will
have out her scissors and fit them close to every hollow and angle. It will be a curious
sight, when it comes, to see these women as they are, but we must wait a little, for Mary
Carmichael will still be encumbered with that self-consciousness in the presence of "sin"
which is the legacy of our sexual barbarity. She will still wear the shoddy old fetters of
class on her feet.
However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit
clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they
do then? and there came to my mind's eye one of those long streets somewhere south of
the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated. With the eye of the
imagination I saw a very ancient lady crossing the street on the arm of a middle-aged
woman, her daughter, perhaps, both so respectably booted and furred that their
dressing in the afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselves put away in
cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout the summer months. They cross
the road when the lamps are being lit (for the dusk is their favourite hour), as they must
have done year after year. The elder is close on eighty; but if one asked her what her life
 44

has meant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for the battle of
Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward the
Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season,
but what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875,
she would look vague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the dinners are
cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the
world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to
say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie.
All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, addressing Mary
Carmichael as if she were present; and went on in thought through the streets of
London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of
unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo,
and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the
swing of Shakespeare's words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old
crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun
and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop
windows. All that you will have to explore, I said to Mary Carmichael, holding your torch
firm in your hand. Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and
its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to
you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world
of gloves and shoes and stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come
through chemists' bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudo-marble.
For in imagination I had gone into a shop; it was laid with black and white paving; it was
hung, astonishingly beautifully, with coloured ribbons. Mary Carmichael might well
have a look at that in passing, I thought, for it is a sight that would lend itself to the pen
as fittingly as any snowy peak or rocky gorge in the Andes. And there is the girl behind
the counter too--I would as soon have her true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of
Napoleon or seventieth study of Keats and his use of Miltonic inversion which old
Professor Z and his like are now inditing. And then I went on very warily, on the very
tips of my toes (so cowardly am I, so afraid of the lash that was once almost laid on my
own shoulders), to murmur that she should also learn to laugh, without bitterness, at
the vanities--say rather at the peculiarities, for it is a less offensive word--of the other
sex. For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never
see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge for sex--to describe
that spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head. Think how much women have
profited by the comments of Juvenal; by the criticism of Strindberg. Think with what
humanity and brilliancy men, from the earliest ages, have pointed out to women that
dark place at the back of the head! And if Mary were very brave and very honest, she
would go behind the other sex and tell us what she found there. A true picture of man as
a whole can never be painted until a woman has described that spot the size of a
shilling. Mr. Woodhouse and Mr. Casuabon are spots of that size and nature. Not of
course that anyone in their senses would counsel her to hold up to scorn and ridicule of
set purpose--literature shows the futility of what is written in that spirit. Be truthful,
one would say, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting. Comedy is bound to
be enriched. New facts are bound to be discovered.
However, it was high time to lower my eyes to the page again. It would be better,
instead of speculating what Mary Carmichael might write and should write, to see what
in fact Mary Carmichael did write. So I began to read again. I remembered that I had
 45

certain grievances against her. She had broken up Jane Austen's sentence, and thus
given me no chance of pluming myself upon my impeccable taste, my fastidious ear. For
it was useless to say, "Yes, yes, this is very nice; but Jane Austen wrote much better than
you do", when I had to admit that there was no point of likeness between them. Then
she had gone further and broken the sequence--the expected order. Perhaps she had
done this unconsciously, merely giving things their natural order, as a woman would, if
she wrote like a woman. But the effect was somehow baffling; one could not see a wave
heaping itself, a crisis coming round the next corner. Therefore I could not plume myself
either upon the depths of my feelings and my profound knowledge of the human heart.
For whenever I was about to feel the usual things in the usual places, about love, about
death, the annoying creature twitched me away, as if the important point were just a
little further on. And thus she made it impossible for me to roll out my sonorous phrases
about "elemental feelings", the "common stuff of humanity", "the depths of the human
heart", and all those other phrases which support us in our belief that, however clever
we may be on top, we are very serious, very profound and very humane underneath.
She made me feel, on the contrary, that instead of being serious and profound and
humane, one might be--and the thought was far less seductive--merely lazy minded and
conventional into the bargain.
But I read on, and noted certain other facts. She was no "genius"--that was evident. She
had nothing like the love of Nature, the fiery imagination, the wild poetry, the brilliant
wit, the brooding wisdom of her great predecessors, Lady Winchilsea, Charlotte Brontë,
Emily Brontë, Jane Austen and George Eliot; she could not write with the melody and
the dignity of Dorothy Osborne--indeed she was no more than a clever girl whose books
will no doubt be pulped by the publishers in ten years' time. But, nevertheless, she had
certain advantages which women of far greater gift lacked even half a century ago. Men
were no longer to her "the opposing faction"; she need not waste her time railing
against them; she need not climb on to the roof and ruin her peace of mind longing for
travel, experience and a knowledge of the world and character that were denied her.
Fear and hatred were almost gone, or traces of them showed only in a slight
exaggeration of the joy of freedom, a tendency to the caustic and satirical, rather than to
the romantic, in her treatment of the other sex. Then there could be no doubt that as a
novelist she enjoyed some natural advantages of a high order. She had a sensibility that
was very wide, eager and free. It responded to an almost imperceptible touch on it. It
feasted like a plant newly stood in the air on every sight and sound that came its way. It
ranged, too, very subtly and curiously, among almost unknown or unrecorded things; it
lighted on small things and showed that perhaps they were not small after all. It brought
buried things to light and made one wonder what need there had been to bury them.
Awkward though she was and without the unconscious bearing of long descent which
makes the least turn of the pen of a Thackeray or a Lamb delightful to the ear, she had--I
began to think--mastered the first great lesson; she wrote as a woman, but as a woman
who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual
quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.
All this was to the good. But no abundance of sensation or fineness of perception would
avail unless she could build up out of the fleeting and the personal the lasting edifice
which remains unthrown. I had said that I would wait until she faced herself with "a
situation". And I meant by that until she proved by summoning, beckoning and getting
together that she was not a skimmer of surfaces merely, but had looked beneath into the
depths. Now is the time, she would say to herself at a certain moment, when without
 46

doing anything violent I can show the meaning of all this. And she would begin--how
unmistakable that quickening is!--beckoning and summoning, and there would rise up
in memory, half forgotten, perhaps quite trivial things in other chapters dropped by the
way. And she would make their presence felt while someone sewed or smoked a pipe as
naturally as possible, and one would feel, as she went on writing, as if one had gone to
the top of the world and seen it laid out, very majestically, beneath.
At any rate, she was making the attempt. And as I watched her lengthening out for the
test, I saw, but hoped that she did not see, the bishops and the deans, the doctors and
the professors, the patriarchs and the pedagogues all at her shouting warning and
advice. You can't do this and you shan't do that! Fellows and scholars only allowed on
the grass! Ladies not admitted without a letter of introduction! Aspiring and graceful
female novelists this way! So they kept at her like the crowd at a fence on the race-
course, and it was her trial to take her fence without looking to right or to left. If you
stop to curse you are lost, I said to her; equally, if you stop to laugh. Hesitate or fumble
and you are done for. Think only of the jump, I implored her, as if I had put the whole of
my money on her back; and she went over it like a bird. But there was fence beyond that
and a fence beyond that. Whether she had the staying power I was doubtful, for the
clapping and the crying were fraying to the nerves. But she did her best. Considering
that Mary Carmichael was no genius, but an unknown girl writing her first novel in a
bed-sitting-room, without enough of those desirable things, time, money and idleness,
she did not do so badly, I thought.
Give her another hundred years, I concluded, reading the last chapter--people's noses
and bare shoulders showed naked against a starry sky, for someone had twitched the
curtain in the drawing-room--give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let
her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better
book one of these days. She will be a poet, I said, putting Life's Adventure, by Mary
Carmichael, at the end of the shelf, in another hundred years' time.
 47

Chapter Six

Next day the light of the October morning was falling in dusty shafts through the
uncurtained windows, and the hum of traffic rose from the street. London then was
winding itself up again; the factory was astir; the machines were beginning. It was
tempting, after all this reading, to look out of the window and see what London was
doing on the morning of the 26th of October 1928. And what was London doing?
Nobody, it seemed, was reading Antony and Cleopatra. London was wholly indifferent, it
appeared, to Shakespeare's plays. Nobody cared a straw--and I do not blame them--for
the future of fiction, the death of poetry or the development by the average woman of a
prose style completely expressive of her mind. If opinions upon any of these matters
had been chalked on the pavement, nobody would have stooped to read them. The
nonchalance of the hurrying feet would have rubbed them out in half an hour. Here
came an errand-boy; here a woman with a dog on a lead. The fascination of the London
street is that no two people are ever alike; each seems bound on some private affair of
his own. There were the business-like, with their little bags; there were the drifters
rattling sticks upon area railings; there were affable characters to whom the streets
serve for clubroom, hailing men in carts and giving information without being asked for
it. Also there were funerals to which men, thus suddenly reminded of the passing of
their own bodies, lifted their hats. And then a very distinguished gentleman came slowly
down a doorstep and paused to avoid collision with a bustling lady who had, by some
means or other, acquired a splendid fur coat and a bunch of Parma violets. They all
seemed separate, self-absorbed, on business of their own.
At this moment, as so often happens in London, there was a complete lull and
suspension of traffic. Nothing came down the street; nobody passed. A single leaf
detached itself from the plane tree at the end of the street, and in that pause and
suspension fell. Somehow it was like a signal falling, a signal pointing to a force in things
which one had overlooked. It seemed to point to a river, which flowed past, invisibly,
round the corner, down the street, and took people and eddied them along, as the
stream at Oxbridge had taken the undergraduate in his boat and the dead leaves. Now it
was bringing from one side of the street to the other diagonally a girl in patent leather
boots, and then a young man in a maroon overcoat; it was also bringing a taxi-cab; and it
brought all three together at a point directly beneath my window; where the taxi
stopped; and the girl and the young man stopped; and they got into the taxi; and then
the cab glided off as if it were swept on by the current elsewhere.
The sight was ordinary enough; what was strange was the rhythmical order with which
my imagination had invested it; and the fact that the ordinary sight of two people
getting into a cab had the power to communicate something of their own seeming
satisfaction. The sight of two people coming down the street and meeting at the corner
seems to ease the mind of some strain, I thought, watching the taxi turn and make off.
Perhaps to think, as I had been thinking these two days, of one sex as distinct from the
other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind. Now that effort had ceased
and that unity had been restored by seeing two people come together and get into a
taxi-cab. The mind is certainly a very mysterious organ, I reflected, drawing my head in
 48

from the window, about which nothing whatever is known, though we depend upon it
so completely. Why do I feel that there are severances and oppositions in the mind, as
there are strains from obvious causes on the body? What does one mean by "the unity of
the mind"? I pondered, for clearly the mind has so great a power of concentrating at any
point at any moment that it seems to have no single state of being. It can separate itself
from the people in the street, for example, and think of itself as apart from them, at an
upper window looking down on them. Or it can think with other people spontaneously,
as, for instance, in a crowd waiting to hear some piece of news read out. It can think
back through its fathers or through its mothers, as I have said that a woman writing
thinks back through her mothers. Again if one is a woman one is often surprised by a
sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being
the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien
and critical. Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into
different perspectives. But some of these states of mind seem, even if adopted
spontaneously, to be less comfortable than others. In order to keep oneself continuing in
them one is unconsciously holding something back, and gradually the repression
becomes an effort. But there may be some state of mind in which one could continue
without effort because nothing is required to be held back. And this perhaps, I thought,
coming in from the window, is one of them. For certainly when I saw the couple get into
the taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in a
natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to co-
operate. One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union
of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness.
But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made
me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in
the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete
satisfaction and happiness? And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so
that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man's brain the
man predominates over the woman, and in the woman's brain the woman
predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the
two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman
part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the
man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is
androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilised and uses
all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a
mind that is purely feminine, I thought. But it would be well to test what one meant by
man-womanly, and conversely by woman-manly, by pausing and looking at a book or
two.
Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it
is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause
or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to
make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the
androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without
impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes
back to Shakespeare's mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind,
though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women. And if it be
true that it is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think
specially or separately of sex, how much harder it is to attain that condition now than
ever before. Here I came to the books by living writers, and there paused and wondered
 49

if this fact were not at the root of something that had long puzzled me. No age can ever
have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own; those innumerable books by men
about women in the British Museum are a proof of it. The Suffrage campaign was no
doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion; it
must have made them lay an emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics which
they would not have troubled to think about had they not been challenged. And when
one is challenged, even by a few women in black bonnets, one retaliates, if one has never
been challenged before, rather excessively. That perhaps accounts for some of the
characteristics that I remember to have found here, I thought, taking down a new novel
by Mr. A, who is in the prime of life and very well thought of, apparently, by the
reviewers. I opened it. Indeed, it was delightful to read a man's writing again. It was so
direct, so straightforward after the writing of women. It indicated such freedom of mind,
such liberty of person, such confidence in himself. One had a sense of physical well-
being in the presence of this well-nourished, well-educated, free mind, which had never
been thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in
whatever way it liked. All this was admirable. But after reading a chapter or two a
shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped
something like the letter "I". One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of
the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not
quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter "I". One began to be tired of "I". Not
but what this "I" was a most respectable "I"; honest and logical; as hard as a nut, and
polished for centuries by good teaching and good feeding. I respect and admire that "I"
from the bottom of my heart. But--here I turned a page or two, looking for something or
other--the worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter "I" all is shapeless as mist. Is that
a tree? No, it is a woman. But... she has not a bone in her body, I thought, watching
Phoebe, for that was her name, coming across the beach. Then Alan got up and the
shadow of Alan at once obliterated Phoebe. For Alan had views and Phoebe was
quenched in the flood of his views. And then Alan, I thought, has passions; and here I
turned page after page very fast, feeling that the crisis was approaching, and so it was. It
took place on the beach under the sun. It was done very openly. It was done very
vigorously. Nothing could have been more indecent. But... I had said "but" too often. One
cannot go on saying "but". One must finish the sentence somehow, I rebuked myself.
Shall I finish it, "But--I am bored!" But why was I bored? Partly because of the
dominance of the letter "I" and the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree, it casts
within its shade. Nothing will grow there. And partly for some more obscure reason.
There seemed to be some obstacle, some impediment in Mr. A's mind which blocked the
fountain of creative energy and shored it within narrow limits. And remembering the
lunch party at Oxbridge, and the cigarette ash and the Manx cat and Tennyson and
Christina Rossetti all in a bunch, it seemed possible that the impediment lay there. As he
no longer hums under his breath, "There has fallen a splendid tear from the passion-
flower at the gate", when Phoebe crosses the beach, and she no longer replies, "My heart
is like a singing bird whose nest is in a water'd shoot", when Alan approaches what can
he do? Being honest as the day and logical as the sun, there is only one thing he can do.
And that he does, to do him justice, over and over (I said turning the pages) and over
again. And that, I added, aware of the awful nature of the confession, seems somehow
dull. Shakespeare's indecency uproots a thousand other things in one's mind, and is far
from being dull. But Shakespeare does it for pleasure; Mr. A, as the nurses say, does it on
purpose. He does it in protest. He is protesting against the equality of the other sex by
asserting his own superiority. He is therefore impeded and inhibited and self-conscious
 50

as Shakespeare might have been if he too had known Miss Clough and Miss Davies.
Doubtless Elizabethan literature would have been very different from what it is if the
woman's movement had begun in the sixteenth century and not in the nineteenth.
What, then, it amounts to, if this theory of the two sides of the mind holds good, is that
virility has now become self-conscious--men, that is to say, are now writing only with
the male side of their brains. It is a mistake for a woman to read them, for she will
inevitably look for something that she will not find. It is the power of suggestion that
one most misses, I thought, taking Mr. B the critic in my hand and reading, very carefully
and very dutifully, his remarks upon the art of poetry. Very able they were, acute and
full of learning; but the trouble was that his feelings no longer communicated; his mind
seemed separated into different chambers; not a sound carried from one to the other.
Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr. B into the mind it falls plump to the ground--
dead; but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives
birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say
that it has the secret of perpetual life.
But whatever the reason may be, it is a fact that one must deplore. For it means--here I
had come to rows of books by Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Kipling--that some of the finest
works of our greatest living writers fall upon deaf ears. Do what she will a woman
cannot find in them that fountain of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It
is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world
of men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman
incomprehensible. It is coming, it is gathering, it is about to burst on one's head, one
begins saying long before the end. That picture will fall on old Jolyon's head; he will die
of the shock; the old clerk will speak over him two or three obituary words; and all the
swans on the Thames will simultaneously burst out singing. But one will rush away
before that happens and hide in the gooseberry bushes, for the emotion which is so
deep, so subtle, so symbolical to a man moves a woman to wonder. So with Mr. Kipling's
officers who turn their backs; and his Sowers who sow the Seed; and his Men who are
alone with their Work; and the Flag--one blushes at all these capital letters as if one had
been caught eavesdropping at some purely masculine orgy. The fact is that neither Mr.
Galsworthy nor Mr. Kipling has a spark of the woman in him. Thus all their qualities
seem to a woman, if one may generalise, crude and immature. They lack suggestive
power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the
mind it cannot penetrate within.
And in that restless mood in which one takes books out and puts them back again
without looking at them I began to envisage an age to come of pure, of self-assertive
virility, such as the letters of professors (take Sir Walter Raleigh's letters, for instance)
seem to forebode, and the rulers of Italy have already brought into being. For one can
hardly fail to be impressed in Rome by the sense of unmitigated masculinity; and
whatever the value of unmitigated masculinity upon the state, one may question the
effect of it upon the art of poetry. At any rate, according to the newspapers, there is a
certain anxiety about fiction in Italy. There has been a meeting of academicians whose
object it is "to develop the Italian novel". "Men famous by birth, or in finance, industry
or the Fascist corporations" came together the other day and discussed the matter, and
a telegram was sent to the Duce expressing the hope "that the Fascist era would soon
give birth to a poet worthy of it". We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful
whether poetry can come out of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a
father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees
 51

in a glass jar in the museum of some county town. Such monsters never live long, it is
said; one has never seen a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two heads on
one body do not make for length of life.
However, the blame for all this, if one is anxious to lay blame, rests no more upon one
sex than upon the other. All seducers and reformers are responsible: Lady Bessborough
when she lied to Lord Granville; Miss Davies when she told the truth to Mr. Greg. All
who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who
drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age,
before Miss Davies and Miss Clough were born, when the writer used both sides of his
mind equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was
androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge.
Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in
them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoi. In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if
not perhaps a little too much of a woman. But that failing is too rare for one to complain
of it, since without some mixture of the kind the intellect seems to predominate and the
other faculties of the mind harden and become barren. However, I consoled myself with
the reflection that this is perhaps a passing phase; much of what I have said in
obedience to my promise to give you the course of my thoughts will seem out of date;
much of what flames in my eyes will seem dubious to you who have not yet come of age.
Even so, the very first sentence that I would write here, I said, crossing over to the
writing-table and taking up the page headed Women and Fiction, is that it is fatal for
anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and
simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the
least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak
consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that
conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilised. Brilliant and effective,
powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it
cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind
between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some
marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide
open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with
perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must
grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn. The writer, I thought, once
his experience is over, must lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness.
He must not look or question what is being done. Rather, he must pluck the petals from
a rose or watch the swans float calmly down the river. And I saw again the current
which took the boat and the undergraduate and the dead leaves; and the taxi took the
man and the woman, I thought, seeing them come together across the street, and the
current swept them away, I thought, hearing far off the roar of London's traffic, into that
tremendous stream.
*****
Here, then, Mary Beton ceases to speak. She has told you how she reached the
conclusion--the prosaic conclusion--that it is necessary to have five hundred a year and
a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry. She has tried to lay
bare the thoughts and impressions that led her to think this. She has asked you to follow
her flying into the arms of a Beadle, lunching here, dining there, drawing pictures in the
British Museum, taking books from the shelf, looking out of the window. While she has
 52

been doing all these things, you no doubt have been observing her failings and foibles
and deciding what effect they have had on her opinions. You have been contradicting
her and making whatever additions and deductions seem good to you. That is all as it
should be, for in a question like this truth is only to be had by laying together many
varieties of error. And I will end now in my own person by anticipating two criticisms,
so obvious that you can hardly fail to make them.
No opinion has been expressed, you may say, upon the comparative merits of the sexes
even as writers. That was done purposely, because, even if the time had come for such a
valuation--and it is far more important at the moment to know how much money
women had and how many rooms than to theorise about their capacities--even if the
time had come I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed
like sugar and butter, not even in Cambridge, where they are so adept at putting people
into classes and fixing caps on their heads and letters after their names. I do not believe
that even the Table of Precedency which you will find in Whitaker's Almanac represents
a final order of values, or that there is any sound reason to suppose that a Commander
of the Bath will ultimately walk into dinner behind a Master in Lunacy. All this pitting of
sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of
inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are
"sides", and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost
importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster
himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease to believe in sides or in
Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots. At any rate, where books are concerned, it is
notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off. Are not
reviews of current literature a perpetual illustration of the difficulty of judgement?
"This great book", "this worthless book", the same book is called by both names. Praise
and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is
the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the
most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that
matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to
sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some
Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up
his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which
used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.
Next I think that you may object that in all this I have made too much of the importance
of material things. Even allowing a generous margin for symbolism, that five hundred a
year stands for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to
think for oneself, still you may say that the mind should rise above such things; and that
great poets have often been poor men. Let me then quote to you the words of your own
Professor of Literature, who knows better than I do what goes to the making of a poet.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch writes: 11
"What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris,
Rossetti, Swinburne--we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were
University men; and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the
only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to
say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it

11 The Art of Writing, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

 53

listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out
of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they
procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact,
of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I challenge you that,
if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write Saul or The Ring
and the Book than Ruskin would have attained to writing Modern Painters if his father
had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and,
moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew
John Clare in a mad-house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug
disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is--however
dishonouring to us as a nation--certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the
poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance.
Believe me--and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundred
and twenty elementary schools,--we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child
in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated
into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born."
Nobody could put the point more plainly. "The poor poet has not in these days, nor has
had for two hundred years, a dog's chance... a poor child in England has little more hope
than had 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. Women have had less
intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a
dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a
room of one's own. However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of
whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough to two wars, the Crimean which
let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War which opened
the doors to the average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be
bettered. Otherwise you would not be here to-night, and your chance of earning five
hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the
extreme.
Still, you may object, why do you attach so much importance to this writing of books by
women when, according to you, it requires so much effort, leads perhaps to the murder
of one's aunts, will make one almost certainly late for luncheon, and may bring one into
very grave disputes with certain very good fellows? My motives, let me admit, are partly
selfish. Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the
bulk. Lately my diet has become a trifle monotonous; history is too much about wars;
biography too much about great men; poetry has shown, I think, a tendency to sterility,
and fiction--but I have sufficiently exposed my disabilities as a critic of modern fiction
and will say no more about it. Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books,
hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, 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. For I am by no means confining you to
fiction. If you would please me--and there are thousands like me--you would write
books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and
biography, and criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainly
profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be
 54

much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy. Moreover, if
you consider any great figure of the past, like Sappho, like the Lady Murasaki, like Emily
Brontë, you will find that she is an inheritor as well as an originator, and has come into
existence because women have come to have the habit of writing naturally; so that even
as a prelude to poetry such activity on your part would be invaluable.
But when I look back through these notes and criticise my own train of thought as I
made them, I find that my motives were not altogether selfish. There runs through these
comments and discursions the conviction--or is it the instinct?--that good books are
desirable and that good writers, even if they show every variety of human depravity, are
still good human beings. Thus when I ask you to write more books I am urging you to do
what will be for your good and for the good of the world at large. How to justify this
instinct or belief I do not know, for philosophic words, if one has not been educated at a
university, are apt to play one false. What is meant by "reality"? It would seem to be
something very erratic, very undependable--now to be found in a dusty road, now in a
scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room
and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and
makes the silent world more real than the world of speech--and then there it is again in
an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too
far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and
makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast
into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the
writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this
reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us. So
at least I infer from reading Lear or Emma or La Recherche du Temps Perdu. For the
reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses;
one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an
intenser life. Those are the enviable people who live at enmity with unreality; and those
are the pitiable who are knocked on the head by the thing done without knowing or
caring. So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking
you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one
can impart it or not.
Here I would stop, but the pressure of convention decrees that every speech must end
with a peroration. And a peroration addressed to women should have something, you
will agree, particularly exalting and ennobling about it. I should implore you to
remember your responsibilities, to be higher, more spiritual; I should remind you how
much depends upon you, and what an influence you can exert upon the future. But those
exhortations can safely, I think, be left to the other sex, who will put them, and indeed
have put them, with far greater eloquence than I can compass. When I rummage in my
own mind I find no noble sentiments about being companions and equals and
influencing the world to higher ends. I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is
much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing
other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in
themselves.
And again I am reminded by dipping into newspapers and novels and biographies that
when a woman speaks to women she should have something very unpleasant up her
sleeve. Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. Women--but are you not
sick to death of the word? I can assure you that I am. Let us agree, then, that a paper
read by a woman to women should end with something particularly disagreeable.
 55

But how does it go? What can I think of? The truth is, I often like women. I like their
unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. I like--but I must not
run on in this way. That cupboard there,--you say it holds clean table-napkins only; but
what if Sir Archibald Bodkin were concealed among them? Let me then adopt a sterner
tone. Have I, in the preceding words, conveyed to you sufficiently the warnings and
reprobation of mankind? I have told you the very low opinion in which you were held by
Mr. Oscar Browning. I have indicated what Napoleon once thought of you and what
Mussolini thinks now. Then, in case any of you aspire to fiction, I have copied out for
your benefit the advice of the critic about courageously acknowledging the limitations
of your sex. I have referred to Professor X and given prominence to his statement that
women are intellectually, morally and physically inferior to men. I have handed on all
that has come my way without going in search of it, and here is a final warning--from
Mr. John Langdon Davies. 12 Mr. John Langdon Davies warns women "that when children
cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary". I hope you
will make a note of it.
How can I further encourage you to go about the business of life? Young women, I would
say, and please attend, for the peroration is beginning, you are, in my opinion,
disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You
have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are
not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of
civilisation. What is your excuse? It is all very well for you to say, pointing to the streets
and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black and white and coffee-
coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in traffic and enterprise and love-making, we
have had other work on our hands. Without our doing, those seas would be unsailed
and those fertile lands a desert. We have borne and bred and washed and taught,
perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three
million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that,
allowing that some had help, takes time.
There is truth in what you say--I will not deny it. But at the same time may I remind you
that there have been at least two colleges for women in existence in England since the
year 1866; that after the year 1880 a married woman was allowed by law to possess her
own property; and that in 1919--which is a whole nine years ago--she was given a vote?
May I also remind you that the most of the professions have been open to you for close
on ten years now? When you reflect upon these immense privileges and the length of
time during which they have been enjoyed, and the fact that there must be at this
moment some two thousand women capable of earning over five hundred a year in one
way or another, you will agree that the excuse of lack of opportunity, training,
encouragement, leisure and money no longer holds good. Moreover, the economists are
telling us that Mrs. Seton has had too many children. You must, of course, go on bearing
children, but, so they say, in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves.
Thus, with some time on your hands and with some book learning in your brains--you
have had enough of the other kind, and are sent to college partly, I suspect, to be un-
educated--surely you should embark upon another stage of your very long, very
laborious and highly obscure career. A thousand pens are ready to suggest what you
should do and what effect you will have. My own suggestion is a little fantastic, I admit; I
prefer, therefore, to put it in the form of fiction.

12 A Short History of Women, by John Langdon Davies.

 56

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for
her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young--alas, she never wrote a word. She
lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my
belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still
lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night,
for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for
great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to
walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your
power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so--I am talking of
the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as
individuals--and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have
the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little
from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to
each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may
be in themselves; if we look past Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the
view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go
alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men
and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's
sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the
lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will
be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part,
without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live
and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I
maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty
and obscurity, is worth while.
THE END

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