A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

Published: 1929
Categorie(s): Non-Fiction, Literary essay, Social science, Feminism & Feminist Theory
Source: http://gutenberg.org
About Woolf:
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) was an English
novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary
figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a
significant figure in London literary society and a member of the
Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs
Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the
book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a
woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction".

Also available on Feedbooks Woolf:

To the Lighthouse (1927)

Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
A Haunted House (1921)
The Waves (1931)
Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street (1923)
Orlando (1928)
Between the Acts (1941)
The Duchess and the Jeweller (1938)
The New Dress (1927)
The Mark on the Wall (1917)

Copyright: This work is available for countries where copyright is

Life+70.

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[* This essay is based upon two papers read to the Arts Society at
Newnharn and the Odtaa at Girton in October 1928. The papers were
too long to be read in full, and have since been altered and expanded.]
 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 Brontës 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 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 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 can 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 countries, and then with infinite labour the grey blocks in
whose shade I was 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 servingman, 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 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 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
recognize 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?

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?—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 gash 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 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].
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 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 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 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 armchairs 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.
 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 motor-cars 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 of 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 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 loquacity
which far exceeded the hour usually alloted 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 cart-wheels 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 his
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 some
women poor?—until it became fifty questions; until the fifty questions leapt
frantically into midstream 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,
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 Bruyere'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[2]. 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[3]. 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 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 specialize 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 astrakhan? 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 psychoanalysis, 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 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 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 one self. 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 of 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 he 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 civilized 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, civilizing 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 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 forever. 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, forever
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 civilization, 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 realized 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 green grocer'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 em ployments 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.
 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 recognized 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, Phedre, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi,
among the dramatists; then among the prose writers: Millamant, Clarissa,
Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Madame de Guermantes—the
names flock to mind, nor do they recall women 'lacking in personality 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[4]. 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 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 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 back
ground, 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 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, looselipped 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
singing 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.
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 six teenth 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 a
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 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 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 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 so 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."'[5] 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 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-doodledum 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[6]. 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 fortunate, 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.
 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
realize 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 we are 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.

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
satirized 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 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 civilize 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 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 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[7]. 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 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 Adele; 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 he 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… '
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 gypsy 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 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 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 patronizing, 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;[8]
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'.[9] 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 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 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.
 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 selfexpression. 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 flowery and so provides a superfluity
of thorns; but until I have read a scene with some care, I cannot be
surewhether 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 Charles 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, conventionalized, 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 woman 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 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 anaemia; 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 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 fertilized 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'.
 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 he 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 he 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 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 everchanging 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 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 ail 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 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
racecourse, 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 a 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.
 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 taxicab. The mind is certainly a very
mysterious organ, I reflected, drawing my head in 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
civilization, 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
taxicab 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 his 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
fertilized 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 he 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 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 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 women'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 generalize, 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 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 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 fertilized. 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 under-graduate 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 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 theorize 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 in to 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:'[10]
'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 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 tonight, 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 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 criticize 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.
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[11]. 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 civilization.
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 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 uneducated—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.
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 he 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.
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Food for the mind
[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.] 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.' [* Every penny which could be
scraped together was set aside for building, and the amenities had to be
postponed.—R. STRACHEY, THE CAUSE.
[2] '"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.
[3] The ancient Germans believed that there was something holy in women,
and accordingly consulted them as oracles.'—FRAZER, GOLDEN
BOUGH.
[4] '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, Phedre 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, Berenice and Roxane, Phedre
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.
[5] A SURVEY OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC, Cecil Gray, P. 246.
[6] See CASSANDRA, by Florence Nightingale, printed in THE CAUSE,
by R. Strachey.
[7] MEMOIR OF JANE AUSTEN, by her nephew, James Edward Austen-
Leigh.
[8] [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.
[9] '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.
[10] THE ART OF WRITING, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.
[11] A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN, by John Langdon Davies.