On the absence of female writers as literary characters

"(T)he girl or woman who tries write...goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she has been putting words and images together; she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over...she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men. She finds a terror and a dream, she finds a beautiful pale face, she finds La Belle Dame Sans Merci, she finds Juliet or Tess or Salome, but precisely what she does not find is that absorbed, drudging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to put words together."

(from "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, p.39)