Unfavorable conditions for a writer

When a woman was liable, as she was in the fifteenth century, to be beaten and flung about the room if she did not marry the man of her parents' choice, the spiritual atmosphere was not favourable to the production of works of art.

(Virginia Woolf, in "Women and Fiction," in Women and Writing, p. 45)

Virginia Woolf on women

"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."

(Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 115).

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins