Writing as covert action

“For most of her life Jane Austen had little opportunity to indulge in solitude. She herself was almost never beyond the reach of family, or out of touch with friends.

“To write is to be self-conscious, as Jane Austen certainly knew. What flows onto paper is more daring or more covert than a writer's own voice.... Composing—and this is the term she generally used—was done in the family sitting room, and it is said, famously, that she quickly covered over the manuscript page when someone else entered unexpectedly, or slipped the pages inside her small mahogany desk.”

(from Jane Austen by Carol Shields, pp. 120-121)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

If Katherine Hepburn had had a child...

"If I'd had a child," she said, "and the child got sick and was crying just as I had to leave for the theatre, where hundreds of people were waiting for me to perform, and I had to make a choice--the play or the child--well, I'd smother the child to death and go on with the show. You just can't have both," she said with frightening certainty, "a career and children."

(Katherine Hepburn, quoted by Jane Fonda, in My Life So Far, by Jane Fonda, p. 428.)

--Submitted by Chandra Garsson

How much it takes to become a writer...

"How much it takes to become a writer. Bent (far more common than we assume), circumstances, time, development of craft—but beyond that: how much conviction as to the importance of what one has to say, one's right to say it. And the will, the measureless store of belief in oneself to be able to come to, cleave to, find the form for one's own life comprehensions. Difficult for any male not born into a class that breeds such confidence. Almost impossible for a girl, a woman."

(from Silences by Tillie Olsen, p. 27)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

Another list of childless female writers

"Think of the literature of writers Dorothy Parker, Ayn Rand, Lillian Hellman, Beatrix Potter, Isak Dinesen, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mitchell, Jane Austen, Helen Keller, Emily Bronte, and Simone de Beauvoir.... These women have enriched our lives immensely in ways other than bringing children into the world."

(from The Childless Revolution: What It Means to Be Childless Today by Madelyn Cain, p. 160)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

The poet as typist

"I am more happy than if it was my book published! I have worked so closely on these poems of Ted's and typed them so many countless times through revision after revision that I feel ecstatic about it all.

"I am so happy his book is accepted first. . . . I can rejoice, then, much more, knowing Ted is ahead of me."

(from Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, edited by Aurelia Schober Plath, p. 297; letter written on Feb. 24, 1957)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins