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Updated July 8, 1997
Created July 8, 1997
On Narrative Voice
1. " ‘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. . . .
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) . . ."
(Chapter 1, 4-5)
On Men and Women
2. "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 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. . . ." (Chapter 1, 24).
3. [On men’s anger, "the one fact" retrieved from her morning’s work at
the British Museum]
"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. . . . 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."
(Chapter 2, 34-35)
On Women and Literature
4. "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. 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."
(Chapter 3, p. 43)
5. "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 signing them, was often a woman."
(Chapter 3, 49)
6. "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." (Chapter 4, 65; cf. T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual
Talent," 1919)
7. "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." (Chapter 4, 75-76)
8. "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."
(Chapter 4, 76)