Contemporary British & American Literature: May 2008

Virginia Woolf
Quotes

From A Room of One’s Own (1929)

“[I]t 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.”

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

“[W]e think back through our mothers if we are women.”

“’Cloe liked Olivia…’ Do not blush. Let us admit that in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women./ ‘Cloe liked Olivia,’ I read. And then it stuck me how immense a change was there. Cloe 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!...”

“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.”

“[I]t is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be a woman-manly or man-womanly.”

“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…. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, 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….[I]f 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 relationship to each other but in relation to each other but in relation to reality…. 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…. 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.”

From “Professions for Women” (1931)

“I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House….. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say it—she was pure…. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: ‘My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.’ And she made as if to guide my pen. …. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her… Had I not killed her she would have killed me.”

From Three Guineas (1938)

“[I]n fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world”

From Jacob’s Room (1922)

"It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses."