A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf (2024)

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Title: A Room of One's Own
Author: Woolf, Virginia [Adeline Virginia] (1882-1941)
Date of first publication: 1929
Edition used as base for this ebook:London: Hogarth Press, 1931["New Edition 1931"; but the 172 pages match thepage count of the 1929 Hogarth Press first edition]
Date first posted: 12 January 2015
Date last updated: 12 January 2015
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1227

This ebook was produced byDelphine Lettau, Cindy Beyer, Mark Akrigg& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Teamat http://www.pgdpcanada.net

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Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

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UNIFORM EDITION OF THE WORKS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

THE VOYAGE OUT
JACOB'S ROOM
MRS. DALLOWAY
THE COMMON READER
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN

In preparation
NIGHT AND DAY
ORLANDO

VIRGINIA WOOLF

PUBLISHED BY LEONARD & VIRGINIA WOOLF AT THE HOGARTH PRESS, TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON. 1931

CONTENTS

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN[1]

[Footnote 1]This essay is based upon two papers read to the Arts Society at Newnhamand the Odtaa at Girton in October 1928. The papers were too long to beread in full, and have since been altered and expanded.

CHAPTER I

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction--whathas that got to do with a room of one's own? I will try to explain. Whenyou asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks ofa river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simplya few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; atribute to the Brontë and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow; somewitticisms if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion toGeorge Eliot; a reference to Mrs. Gaskell and one would have done. Butat second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women andfiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and whatthey 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 itmight mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together andyou want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to considerthe subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soonsaw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to aconclusion. I should never be able to fulfil what is, I understand, thefirst duty of a lecturer--to hand you after an hour's discourse a nuggetof pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep onthe mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinionupon one minor point--a woman must have money and a room of her own ifshe is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the greatproblem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fictionunsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon thesetwo questions--women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned,unsolved problems. But in order to make some amends I am going to dowhat I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room andthe money. I am going to develop in your presence as fully and freely asI can the train of thought which led me to think this. Perhaps if I laybare the ideas, the prejudices, that lie behind this statement you willfind that they have some bearing upon women and some upon fiction. Atany rate, when a subject is highly controversial--and any question aboutsex is that--one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show howone came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one'saudience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe thelimitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fictionhere is likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore I propose,making use of all the liberties and licences of a novelist, to tell youthe story of the two days that preceded my coming here--how, bowed downby the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, Ipondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life. I need notsay that what I am about to describe has no existence; Oxbridge is aninvention; so is Fernham; "I" is only a convenient term for somebody whohas no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps besome truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth andto decide whether any part of it is worth keeping. If not, you will ofcourse throw the whole of it into the waste-paper basket and forget allabout it.

Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or byany name you please--it is not a matter of any importance) sitting onthe banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost inthought. That collar I have spoken of, women and fiction, the need ofcoming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts ofprejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground. To the right andleft bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour,even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank thewillows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders.The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burningtree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through thereflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been.There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought--tocall it by a prouder name than it deserved--had let its line down intothe stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among thereflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it,until--you know the little tug--the sudden conglomeration of an idea atthe end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and thecareful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, howinsignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a goodfisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be oneday worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thoughtnow, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in thecourse of what I am going to say.

But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious propertyof its kind--put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting,and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither andthither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossibleto sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extremerapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man's figure rose to interceptme. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of acurious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimedat me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather thanreason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was theturf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowedhere; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of amoment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his faceassumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel,no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against theFellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was thatin protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years insuccession, they had sent my little fish into hiding.

What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing Icould not now remember. The spirit of peace descended like a cloud fromheaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courtsand quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning. Strolling throughthose colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the presentseemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glasscabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed fromany contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was atliberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with themoment. As chance would have it, some stray memory of some old essayabout revisiting Oxbridge in the long vacation brought Charles Lamb tomind--Saint Charles, said Thackeray, putting a letter of Lamb's to hisforehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I give you my thoughts as theycame to me), Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one wouldhave liked to say, 'Tell me then how you wrote your essays?' For hisessays are superior even to Max Beerbohm's, I thought, with all theirperfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightningcrack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed andimperfect, but starred with poetry. Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps ahundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay--the name escapesme--about the manuscript of one of Milton's poems which he saw here. Itwas Lycidas perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think itpossible that any word in Lycidas could have been different from whatit is. To think of Milton changing the words in that poem seemed to hima sort of sacrilege. This led me to remember what I could of Lycidasand to amuse myself with guessing which word it could have been thatMilton had altered, and why. It then occurred to me that the verymanuscript itself which Lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yardsaway, so that one could follow Lamb's footsteps across the quadrangle tothat famous library where the treasure is kept. Moreover, I recollected,as I put this plan into execution, it is in this famous library that themanuscript of Thackeray's Esmond is also preserved. The critics oftensay that Esmond is Thackeray's most perfect novel. But the affectationof the style, with its imitation of the eighteenth century, hampers one,so far as I remember; unless indeed the eighteenth-century style wasnatural to Thackeray--a fact that one might prove by looking at themanuscript and seeing whether the alterations were for the benefit ofthe style or of the sense. But then one would have to decide what isstyle and what is meaning, a question which--but here I was actually atthe door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, forinstantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with aflutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery,kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back thatladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow ofthe College or furnished with a letter of introduction.

That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of completeindifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all itstreasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently andwill, so far as I am concerned, so sleep for ever. Never will I wakethose echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as Idescended 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 redto the ground; there was no great hardship in doing either. But thesound of music reached my ear. Some service or celebration was goingforward. The organ complained magnificently as I passed the chapel door.Even the sorrow of Christianity sounded in that serene air more like therecollection of sorrow than sorrow itself; even the groanings of theancient organ seemed lapped in peace. I had no wish to enter had I theright, and this time the verger might have stopped me, demanding perhapsmy baptismal certificate, or a letter of introduction from the Dean. Butthe outside of these magnificent buildings is often as beautiful as theinside. Moreover, it was amusing enough to watch the congregationassembling, coming in and going out again, busying themselves at thedoor of the Chapel like bees at the mouth of a hive. Many were in capand gown; some had tufts of fur on their shoulders; others were wheeledin bath-chairs; others, though not past middle age, seemed creased andcrushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giantcrabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of anaquarium. As I leant against the wall the University indeed seemed asanctuary in which are preserved rare types which would soon be obsoleteif left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand. Oldstories of old deans and old dons came back to mind, but before I hadsummoned up courage to whistle--it used to be said that at the sound ofa whistle old Professor ---- instantly broke into a gallop--thevenerable congregation had gone inside. The outside of the chapelremained. As you know, its high domes and pinnacles can be seen, like asailing-ship always voyaging never arriving, lit up at night and visiblefor miles, far away across the hills. Once, presumably, this quadranglewith its smooth lawns, its massive buildings and the chapel itself wasmarsh too, where the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Teams ofhorses and oxen, I thought, must have hauled the stone in wagons fromfar counties, and then with infinite labour the grey blocks in whoseshade I was now standing were poised in order one on top of another, andthen the painters brought their glass for the windows, and the masonswere busy for centuries up on that roof with putty and cement, spade andtrowel. Every Saturday somebody must have poured gold and silver out ofa leathern purse into their ancient fists, for they had their beer andskittles presumably of an evening. An unending stream of gold andsilver, I thought, must have flowed into this court perpetually to keepthe stones coming and the masons working; to level, to ditch, to dig andto drain. But it was then the age of faith, and money was pouredliberally to set these stones on a deep foundation, and when the stoneswere raised, still more money was poured in from the coffers of kingsand queens and great nobles to ensure that hymns should be sung here andscholars taught. Lands were granted; tithes were paid. And when the ageof faith was over and the age of reason had come, still the same flow ofgold 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 ofmen who had made, say, a fortune from industry, and returned, in theirwills, 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 splendidequipment of costly and delicate instruments which now stands on glassshelves, where centuries ago the grasses waved and the swine rootled.Certainly, as I strolled round the court, the foundation of gold andsilver seemed deep enough; the pavement laid solidly over the wildgrasses. Men with trays on their heads went busily from staircase tostaircase. Gaudy blossoms flowered in window-boxes. The strains of thegramophone blared out from the rooms within. It was impossible not toreflect--the reflection whatever it may have been was cut short. Theclock 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 thatluncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty thatwas said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldomspare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist's conventionnot to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon andducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked acigar or drank a glass of wine. Here, however, I shall take the libertyto defy that convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasionbegan with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook hadspread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded hereand there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. Afterthat came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brownbirds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many and various,came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and thesweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard;their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent. And no soonerhad the roast and its retinue been done with than the silentserving-man, the Beadle himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, setbefore us, wreathed in napkins, a confection which rose all sugar fromthe waves. To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca wouldbe an insult. Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushedcrimson; 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 hardlittle electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and outupon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow whichis the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. Noneed to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going toheaven and Vandyck is of the company--in other words, how good lifeseemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or thatgrievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one's kind, as,lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in thewindow-seat.

If by good luck there had been an ash-tray handy, if one had not knockedthe ash out of the window in default, if things had been a littledifferent from what they were, one would not have seen, presumably, acat without a tail. The sight of that abrupt and truncated animalpadding softly across the quadrangle changed by some fluke of thesubconscious intelligence the emotional light for me. It was as ifsomeone had let fall a shade. Perhaps the excellent hock wasrelinquishing its hold. Certainly, as I watched the Manx cat pause inthe middle of the lawn as if it too questioned the universe, somethingseemed lacking, something seemed different. But what was lacking, whatwas different, I asked myself, listening to the talk? And to answer thatquestion 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 anotherluncheon party held in rooms not very far distant from these; butdifferent. Everything was different. Meanwhile the talk went on amongthe guests, who were many and young, some of this sex, some of that; itwent on swimmingly, it went on agreeably, freely, amusingly. And as itwent on I set it against the background of that other talk, and as Imatched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendant, thelegitimate heir of the other. Nothing was changed; nothing was differentsave only--here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what wasbeing said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes, that wasit--the change was there. Before the war at a luncheon party like thispeople would have said precisely the same things but they would havesounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sortof humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changedthe value of the words themselves. Could one set that humming noise towords? Perhaps with the help of the poets one could. A book lay besideme and, opening it, I turned casually enough to Tennyson. And here Ifound 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 thewomen?

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 suchthings even under their breath at luncheon parties before the war that Iburst out laughing, and had to explain my laughter by pointing at theManx cat, who did look a little absurd, poor beast, without a tail, inthe middle of the lawn. Was he really born so, or had he lost his tailin an accident? The tailless cat, though some are said to exist in theIsle of Man, is rarer than one thinks. It is a queer animal, quaintrather than beautiful. It is strange what a difference a tail makes--youknow the sort of things one says as a lunch party breaks up and peopleare finding their coats and hats.

This one, thanks to the hospitality of the host, had lasted far into theafternoon. The beautiful October day was fading and the leaves werefalling from the trees in the avenue as I walked through it. Gate aftergate seemed to close with gentle finality behind me. Innumerable beadleswere fitting innumerable keys into well-oiled locks; the treasure-housewas being made secure for another night. After the avenue one comes outupon a road--I forget its name--which leads you, if you take the rightturning, along to Fernham. But there was plenty of time. Dinner was nottill half-past seven. One could almost do without dinner after such aluncheon. It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind andmakes 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. Andthen, switching off into the other measure, I sang, where the waters arechurned 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 theywere!

In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own age, silly and absurdthough these comparisons are, I went on to wonder if honestly one couldname two living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rossettiwere then. Obviously it is impossible, I thought, looking into thosefoaming waters, to compare them. The very reason why that poetry excitesone to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates somefeeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the warperhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling tocheck the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But theliving poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn outof us at the moment. One does not recognise it in the first place; oftenfor some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and comparesit jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hencethe difficulty of modern poetry; and it is because of this difficultythat one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines of any goodmodern poet. For this reason--that my memory failed me--the argumentflagged for want of material. But why, I continued, moving on towardsHeadingley, have we stopped humming under our breath at luncheonparties? 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 thatromance was killed? Certainly it was a shock (to women in particularwith their illusions about education, and so on) to see the faces of ourrulers in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked--German,English, French--so stupid. But lay the blame where one will, on whomone will, the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti tosing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer nowthan then. One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. Butwhy say "blame"? Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe,whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place? Fortruth... those dots mark the spot where, in search of truth, I missedthe turning up to Fernham. Yes indeed, which was truth and which wasillusion, I asked myself? What was the truth about these houses, forexample, dim and festive now with their red windows in the dusk, but rawand red and squalid, with their sweets and their bootlaces, at nineo'clock in the morning? And the willows and the river and the gardensthat 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 theillusion 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 tosuppose that I soon found out my mistake about the turning and retracedmy steps to Fernham.

As I have said already that it was an October day, I dare not forfeityour respect and imperil the fair name of fiction by changing the seasonand describing lilacs hanging over garden walls, crocuses, tulips andother flowers of spring. Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer thefacts the better the fiction--so we are told. Therefore it was stillautumn and the leaves were still yellow and falling, if anything, alittle faster than before, because it was now evening (seventwenty-three to be precise) and a breeze (from the south-west to beexact) 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 thefolly of the fancy--it was nothing of course but a fancy--that the lilacwas shaking its flowers over the garden walls, and the brimstonebutterflies were scudding hither and thither, and the dust of the pollenwas in the air. A wind blew, from what quarter I know not, but it liftedthe half-grown leaves so that there was a flash of silver grey in theair. It was the time between the lights when colours undergo theirintensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beatof an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the worldrevealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for,unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), thebeauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one oflaughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The gardens ofFernham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild and open, and in thelong grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung, were daffodils andbluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times, and now wind-blownand waving as they tugged at their roots. The windows of the building,curved like ships' windows among generous waves of red brick, changedfrom lemon to silver under the flight of the quick spring clouds.Somebody was in a hammock, somebody, but in this light they werephantoms only, half guessed, half seen, raced across the grass--would noone stop her?--and then on the terrace, as if popping out to breathe theair, to glance at the garden, came a bent figure, formidable yet humble,with her great forehead and her shabby dress--could it be the famousscholar, 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 tornasunder by star or sword--the flash of some terrible reality leaping, asits way is, out of the heart of the spring. For youth----

Here was my soup. Dinner was being served in the great dining-hall. Farfrom being spring it was in fact an evening in October. Everybody wasassembled 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 thatthere might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. Theplate was plain. Next came beef with its attendant greens andpotatoes--a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddymarket, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining andcheapening, and women with string bags on Monday morning. There was noreason to complain of human nature's daily food, seeing that the supplywas sufficient and coal-miners doubtless were sitting down to less.Prunes and custard followed. And if anyone complains that prunes, evenwhen mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they arenot), stringy as a miser's heart and exuding a fluid such as might runin misers' veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for eightyyears and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect that there arepeople whose charity embraces even the prune. Biscuits and cheese camenext, and here the water-jug was liberally passed round, for it is thenature of biscuits to be dry, and these were biscuits to the core. Thatwas all. The meal was over. Everybody scraped their chairs back; theswing-doors swung violently to and fro; soon the hall was emptied ofevery sign of food and made ready no doubt for breakfast next morning.Down corridors and up staircases the youth of England went banging andsinging. And was it for a guest, a stranger (for I had no more righthere in Fernham than in Trinity or Somerville or Girton or Newnham orChristchurch), to say, "The dinner was not good," or to say (we werenow, Mary Seton and I, in her sitting-room), "Could we not have dined uphere alone?" for if I had said anything of the kind I should have beenprying and searching into the secret economies of a house which to thestranger wears so fine a front of gaiety and courage. No, one could saynothing of the sort. Indeed, conversation for a moment flagged. Thehuman frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together,and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt inanother million years, a good dinner is of great importance to goodtalk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dinedwell. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes. We areall probably going to heaven, and Vandyck is, we hope, to meet usround the next corner--that is the dubious and qualifying state of mindthat 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 asquat bottle and little glasses--(but there should have been sole andpartridge to begin with)--so that we were able to draw up to the fireand repair some of the damages of the day's living. In a minute or so wewere slipping freely in and out among all those objects of curiosity andinterest which form in the mind in the absence of a particular person,and are naturally to be discussed on coming together again--how somebodyhas married, another has not; one thinks this, another that; one hasimproved out of all knowledge, the other most amazingly gone to thebad--with all those speculations upon human nature and the character ofthe amazing world we live in which spring naturally from suchbeginnings. While these things were being said, however, I becameshamefacedly aware of a current setting in of its own accord andcarrying everything forward to an end of its own. One might be talkingof Spain or Portugal, of book or racehorse, but the real interest ofwhatever was said was none of those things, but a scene of masons on ahigh roof some five centuries ago. Kings and nobles brought treasure inhuge sacks and poured it under the earth. This scene was for ever comingalive in my mind and placing itself by another of lean cows and a muddymarket and withered greens and the stringy hearts of old men--these twopictures, disjointed and disconnected and nonsensical as they were, werefor ever coming together and combating each other and had me entirely attheir 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 itwould fade and crumble like the head of the dead king when they openedthe coffin at Windsor. Briefly, then, I told Miss Seton about the masonswho had been all those years on the roof of the chapel, and about thekings and queens and nobles bearing sacks of gold and silver on theirshoulders, which they shovelled into the earth; and then how the greatfinancial magnates of our own time came and laid cheques and bonds, Isuppose, where the others had laid ingots and rough lumps of gold. Allthat lies beneath the colleges down there, I said; but this college,where we are now sitting, what lies beneath its gallant red brick andthe wild unkempt grasses of the garden? What force is behind that plainchina off which we dined, and (here it popped out of my mouth before Icould 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 werehired. Committees met. Envelopes were addressed. Circulars were drawnup. Meetings were held; letters were read out; so-and-so has promised somuch; on the contrary, Mr. ---- won't give a penny. The SaturdayReview 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 frontrow? Let us look up what John Stuart Mill said on the subject. Cananyone persuade the editor of the ---- to print a letter? Can we getLady ---- to sign it? Lady ---- is out of town. That was the way it wasdone, presumably, sixty years ago, and it was a prodigious effort, and agreat deal of time was spent on it. And it was only after a longstruggle and with the utmost difficulty that they got thirty thousandpounds together.[2]So obviously we cannot have wine and partridges andservants carrying tin dishes on their heads, she said. We cannot havesofas and separate rooms. "The amenities," she said, quoting from somebook or other, "will have to wait."[3]

[Footnote 2]"We are told that we ought to ask for £30,000 at least.... It is not alarge sum, considering that there is to be but one college of this sortfor Great Britain, Ireland and the Colonies, and considering how easy itis to raise immense sums for boys' schools. But considering how fewpeople really wish women to be educated, it is a good deal."--LadyStephen, Emily Davies and Girton College.

[Footnote 3]Every penny which could be scraped together was set aside for building,and the amenities had to be postponed.--R. Strachey, The Cause.

At the thought of all those women working year after year and finding ithard to get two thousand pounds together, and as much as they could doto get thirty thousand pounds, we burst out in scorn at thereprehensible poverty of our sex. What had our mothers been doing thenthat they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking inat shop windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo? There were somephotographs on the mantelpiece. Mary's mother--if that was herpicture--may have been a wastrel in her spare time (she had thirteenchildren by a minister of the church), but if so her gay and dissipatedlife had left too few traces of its pleasures on her face. She was ahomely body; an old lady in a plaid shawl which was fastened by a largecameo; and she sat in a basket-chair, encouraging a spaniel to look atthe camera, with the amused, yet strained expression of one who is surethat the dog will move directly the bulb is pressed. Now if she had goneinto business; had become a manufacturer of artificial silk or a magnateon the Stock Exchange; if she had left two or three hundred thousandpounds to Fernham, we could have been sitting at our ease to-night andthe 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 motherbefore her had learnt the great art of making money and had left theirmoney, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to foundfellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated tothe use of their own sex, we might have dined very tolerably up herealone off a bird and a bottle of wine; we might have looked forwardwithout undue confidence to a pleasant and honourable lifetime spent inthe shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions. We might havebeen exploring or writing; mooning about the venerable places of theearth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going atten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to writea little poetry. Only, if Mrs. Seton and her like had gone into businessat the age of fifteen, there would have been--that was the snag in theargument--no Mary. What, I asked, did Mary think of that? There betweenthe curtains was the October night, calm and lovely, with a star or twocaught in the yellowing trees. Was she ready to resign her share of itand 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 ofpraising for the fineness of its air and the quality of its cakes, inorder that Fernham might have been endowed with fifty thousand pounds orso by a stroke of the pen? For, to endow a college would necessitate thesuppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearingthirteen children--no human being could stand it. Consider the facts, wesaid. First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the babyis 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 playingwith 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 isnot a pleasant one. People say, too, that human nature takes its shapein the years between one and five. If Mrs. Seton, I said, had beenmaking money, what sort of memories would you have had of games andquarrels? What would you have known of Scotland, and its fine air andcakes 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 isequally useless to ask what might have happened if Mrs. Seton and hermother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth and laid itunder the foundations of college and library, because, in the firstplace, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had itbeen possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money theyearned. It is only for the last forty-eight years that Mrs. Seton hashad a penny of her own. For all the centuries before that it would havebeen her husband's property--a thought which, perhaps, may have had itsshare in keeping Mrs. Seton and her mothers off the Stock Exchange.Every penny I earn, they may have said, will be taken from me anddisposed of according to my husband's wisdom--perhaps to found ascholarship or to endow a fellowship in Balliol or Kings, so that toearn money, even if I could earn money, is not a matter that interestsme very greatly. I had better leave it to my husband.

At any rate, whether or not the blame rested on the old lady who waslooking at the spaniel, there could be no doubt that for some reason orother our mothers had mismanaged their affairs very gravely. Not a pennycould be spared for "amenities"; for partridges and wine, beadles andturf, books and cigars, libraries and leisure. To raise bare walls outof the bare earth was the utmost they could do.

So we talked standing at the window and looking, as so many thousandslook every night, down on the domes and towers of the famous citybeneath us. It was very beautiful, very mysterious in the autumnmoonlight. The old stone looked very white and venerable. One thought ofall the books that were assembled down there; of the pictures of oldprelates and worthies hanging in the panelled rooms; of the paintedwindows that would be throwing strange globes and crescents on thepavement; of the tablets and memorials and inscriptions; of thefountains and the grass; of the quiet rooms looking across the quietquadrangles. And (pardon me the thought) I thought, too, of theadmirable smoke and drink and the deep arm-chairs and the pleasantcarpets: of the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are theoffspring of luxury and privacy and space. Certainly our mothers had notprovided us with any thing comparable to all this--our mothers who foundit difficult to scrape together thirty thousand pounds, our mothers whobore thirteen children to ministers of religion at St. Andrews.

So I went back to my inn, and as I walked through the dark streets Ipondered this and that, as one does at the end of the day's work. Ipondered why it was that Mrs. Seton had no money to leave us; and whateffect 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 withtufts of fur upon their shoulders; and I remembered how if one whistledone of them ran; and I thought of the organ booming in the chapel and ofthe shut doors of the library; and I thought how unpleasant it is to belocked 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 povertyand insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of thelack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that itwas time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments andits impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into thehedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky.One seemed alone with an inscrutable society. All human beings were laidasleep--prone, horizontal, dumb. Nobody seemed stirring in the streetsof Oxbridge. Even the door of the hotel sprang open at the touch of aninvisible hand--not a boots was sitting up to light me to bed, it was solate.

CHAPTER II

The scene, if I may ask you to follow me, was now changed. The leaveswere still falling, but in London now, not Oxbridge; and I must ask youto imagine a room, like many thousands, with a window looking acrosspeople's hats and vans and motorcars to other windows, and on the tableinside the room a blank sheet of paper on which was written in largeletters Women and Fiction, but no more. The inevitable sequel tolunching and dining at Oxbridge seemed, unfortunately, to be a visit tothe British Museum. One must strain off what was personal and accidentalin all these impressions and so reach the pure fluid, the essential oilof truth. For that visit to Oxbridge and the luncheon and the dinner hadstarted 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 haspoverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation ofworks of art?--a thousand questions at once suggested themselves. Butone needed answers, not questions; and an answer was only to be had byconsulting the learned and the unprejudiced, who have removed themselvesabove the strife of tongue and the confusion of body and issued theresult of their reasoning and research in books which are to be found inthe British Museum. If truth is not to be found on the shelves of theBritish Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and apencil, is truth?

Thus provided, thus confident and enquiring, I set out in the pursuit oftruth. The day, though not actually wet, was dismal, and the streets inthe neighbourhood of the Museum were full of open coal-holes, down whichsacks were showering; four-wheeled cabs were drawing up and depositingon the pavement corded boxes containing, presumably, the entire wardrobeof some Swiss or Italian family seeking fortune or refuge or some otherdesirable commodity which is to be found in the boarding-houses ofBloomsbury in the winter. The usual hoarse-voiced men paraded thestreets with plants on barrows. Some shouted; others sang. London waslike a workshop. London was like a machine. We were all being shotbackwards and forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern.The British Museum was another department of the factory. Theswing-doors swung open; and there one stood under the vast dome, as ifone were a thought in the huge bald forehead which is so splendidlyencircled by a band of famous names. One went to the counter; one took aslip of paper; one opened a volume of the catalogue, and..... the fivedots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder andbewilderment. Have you any notion how many books are written about womenin the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written bymen? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal inthe universe? Here had I come with a notebook and a pencil proposing tospend a morning reading, supposing that at the end of the morning Ishould have transferred the truth to my notebook. But I should need tobe a herd of elephants, I thought, and a wilderness of spiders,desperately referring to the animals that are reputed longest lived andmost multitudinously eyed, to cope with all this. I should need claws ofsteel and beak of brass even to penetrate the husk. How shall I everfind the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper? I askedmyself, and in despair began running my eye up and down the long list oftitles. Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. Sex andits nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what wassurprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex--woman,that is to say--also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingerednovelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have takenno degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are notwomen. Some of these books were, on the face of it, frivolous andfacetious; but many, on the other hand, were serious and prophetic,moral and hortatory. Merely to read the titles suggested innumerableschoolmasters, innumerable clergymen mounting their platforms andpulpits and holding forth with a loquacity which far exceeded the hourusually allotted to such discourse on this one subject. It was a moststrange phenomenon; and apparently--here I consulted the letter M--oneconfined to the male sex. Women do not write books about men--a factthat I could not help welcoming with relief, for if I had first to readall that men have written about women, then all that women have writtenabout men, the aloe that flowers once in a hundred years would flowertwice before I could set pen to paper. So, making a perfectly arbitrarychoice of a dozen volumes or so, I sent my slips of paper to lie in thewire tray, and waited in my stall, among the other seekers for theessential oil of truth.

What could be the reason, then, of this curious disparity, I wondered,drawing cartwheels on the slips of paper provided by the Britishtaxpayer for other purposes. Why are women, judging from this catalogue,so much more interesting to men than men are to women? A very curiousfact it seemed, and my mind wandered to picture the lives of men whospend their time in writing books about women; whether they were old oryoung, married or unmarried, red-nosed or hump-backed--anyhow, it wasflattering, vaguely, to feel oneself the object of such attention,provided that it was not entirely bestowed by the crippled and theinfirm--so I pondered until all such frivolous thoughts were ended by anavalanche of books sliding down on to the desk in front of me. Now thetrouble began. The student who has been trained in research at Oxbridgehas no doubt some method of shepherding his question past alldistractions till it runs into its answer as a sheep runs into its pen.The student by my side, for instance, who was copying assiduously from ascientific manual, was, I felt sure, extracting pure nuggets of theessential ore every ten minutes or so. His little grunts of satisfactionindicated so much. But if, unfortunately, one has had no training in auniversity, the question far from being shepherded to its pen flies likea frightened flock hither and thither, helter-skelter, pursued by awhole pack of hounds. Professors, schoolmasters, sociologists,clergymen, novelists, essayists, journalists, men who had noqualification save that they were not women, chased my simple and singlequestion--Why are women poor?--until it became fifty questions; untilthe fifty questions leapt frantically into mid-stream and were carriedaway. Every page in my notebook was scribbled over with notes. To showthe state of mind I was in, I will read you a few of them, explainingthat the page was headed quite simply, Women and Poverty, in blockletters; 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 Bruyère'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 SamuelButler say, "Wise men never say what they think of women?" Wise mennever say anything else apparently. But, I continued, leaning back in mychair and looking at the vast dome in which I was a single but by nowsomewhat harassed thought, what is so unfortunate is that wise men neverthink 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 theycapable of education or incapable? Napoleon thought them incapable. Dr.Johnson thought the opposite.[4]Have they souls or have they not souls?Some savages say they have none. Others, on the contrary, maintain thatwomen are half divine and worship them on that account.[5]Some sages hold that they are shallower in the brain; others that they are deeperin the consciousness. Goethe honoured them; Mussolini despises them.Wherever one looked men thought about women and thought differently. Itwas impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing withenvy 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 withthe wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, itwas bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers.Every drop had escaped.

[Footnote 4]"'Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore theychoose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, theynever could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.' ... Injustice to the sex, I think it but candid to acknowledge that, in asubsequent conversation, he told me that he was serious in what hesaid."--Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

[Footnote 5]"The ancient Germans believed that there was something holy in women,and accordingly consulted them as oracles."--Frazer, Golden Bough.

I could not possibly go home, I reflected, and add as a seriouscontribution to the study of women and fiction that women have less hairon their bodies than men, or that the age of puberty among the South SeaIslanders is nine--or is it ninety?--even the handwriting had become inits distraction indecipherable. It was disgraceful to have nothing moreweighty or respectable to show after a whole morning's work. And if Icould not grasp the truth about W. (as for brevity's sake I had come tocall her) in the past, why bother about W. in the future? It seemed purewaste of time to consult all those gentlemen who specialise in woman andher effect on whatever it may be--politics, children, wages,morality--numerous and learned as they are. One might as well leavetheir books unopened.

But while I pondered I had unconsciously, in my listlessness, in mydesperation, been drawing a picture where I should, like my neighbour,have been writing a conclusion. I had been drawing a face, a figure. Itwas the face and the figure of Professor von X. engaged in writing hismonumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority ofthe Female Sex. He was not in my picture a man attractive to women. Hewas heavily built; he had a great jowl; to balance that he had verysmall eyes; he was very red in the face. His expression suggested thathe was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on thepaper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but evenwhen he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killingit; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained. Could itbe his wife, I asked, looking at my picture? Was she in love with acavalry officer? Was the cavalry officer slim and elegant and dressed inastrachan? Had he been laughed at, to adopt the Freudian theory, in hiscradle by a pretty girl? For even in his cradle the professor, Ithought, could not have been an attractive child. Whatever the reason,the professor was made to look very angry and very ugly in my sketch, ashe wrote his great book upon the mental, moral and physical inferiorityof women. Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitablemorning's work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that thesubmerged truth sometimes comes to the top. A very elementary exercisein psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psycho-analysis,showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angryprofessor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while Idreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement,boredom--all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeededeach other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, beenlurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had. It referred meunmistakably to the one book, to the one phrase, which had roused thedemon; it was the professor's statement about the mental, moral andphysical 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 isnaturally the inferior of a little man--I looked at the student nextme--who breathes hard, wears a ready-made tie, and has not shaved thisfortnight. One has certain foolish vanities. It is only human nature, Ireflected, and began drawing cartwheels and circles over the angryprofessor's face till he looked like a burning bush or a flamingcomet--anyhow, an apparition without human semblance or significance.The professor was nothing now but a faggot burning on the top ofHampstead Heath. Soon my own anger was explained and done with; butcuriosity remained. How explain the anger of the professors? Why werethey angry? For when it came to analysing the impression left by thesebooks there was always an element of heat. This heat took many forms; itshowed itself in satire, in sentiment, in curiosity, in reprobation. Butthere was another element which was often present and could notimmediately be identified. Anger, I called it. But it was anger that hadgone underground and mixed itself with all kinds of other emotions. Tojudge from its odd effects, it was anger disguised and complex, notanger simple and open.

Whatever the reason, all these books, I thought, surveying the pile onthe desk, are worthless for my purposes. They were worthlessscientifically, that is to say, though humanly they were full ofinstruction, interest, boredom, and very queer facts about the habits ofthe Fiji Islanders. They had been written in the red light of emotionand not in the white light of truth. Therefore they must be returned tothe central desk and restored each to his own cell in the enormoushoneycomb. All that I had retrieved from that morning's work had beenthe one fact of anger. The professors--I lumped them together thus--wereangry. But why, I asked myself, having returned the books, why, Irepeated, standing under the colonnade among the pigeons and theprehistoric canoes, why are they angry? And, asking myself thisquestion, I strolled off to find a place for luncheon. What is the realnature of what I call for the moment their anger? I asked. Here was apuzzle that would last all the time that it takes to be served with foodin a small restaurant somewhere near the British Museum. Some previousluncher 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 ofvery large letters ran across the page. Somebody had made a big score inSouth Africa. Lesser ribbons announced that Sir Austen Chamberlain wasat Geneva. A meat axe with human hair on it had been found in a cellar.Mr. Justice ---- commented in the Divorce Courts upon the Shamelessnessof Women. Sprinkled about the paper were other pieces of news. A filmactress had been lowered from a peak in California and hung suspended inmid-air. The weather was going to be foggy. The most transient visitorto this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to beaware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under therule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect thedominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and theinfluence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor andsub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge. He was thecricketer; he owned the racehorses and the yachts. He was the directorof the company that pays two hundred per cent to its shareholders. Heleft millions to charities and colleges that were ruled by himself. Hesuspended the film actress in mid-air. He will decide if the hair on themeat axe is human; he it is who will acquit or convict the murderer, andhang him, or let him go free. With the exception of the fog he seemed tocontrol everything. Yet he was angry. I knew that he was angry by thistoken. When I read what he wrote about women I thought, not of what hewas saying, but of himself. When an arguer argues dispassionately hethinks only of the argument; and the reader cannot help thinking of theargument too. If he had written dispassionately about women, had usedindisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no trace ofwishing that the result should be one thing rather than another, onewould not have been angry either. One would have accepted the fact, asone accepts the fact that a pea is green or a canary yellow. So be it, Ishould have said. But I had been angry because he was angry. Yet itseemed absurd, I thought, turning over the evening paper, that a manwith 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 theirwealth. The professors, or patriarchs, as it might be more accurate tocall them, might be angry for that reason partly, but partly for onethat lies a little less obviously on the surface. Possibly they were not"angry" at all; often, indeed, they were admiring, devoted, exemplary inthe relations of private life. Possibly when the professor insisted alittle too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concernednot with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was whathe was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis,because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price. Life for bothsexes--and I looked at them, shouldering their way along thepavement--is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls forgigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures ofillusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Withoutself-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generatethis imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? Bythinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that onehas 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 thepathetic devices of the human imagination--over other people. Hence theenormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule,of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, areby nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chiefsources of his power. But let me turn the light of this observation onto real life, I thought. Does it help to explain some of thosepsychological puzzles that one notes in the margin of daily life? Doesit explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, mostmodest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passagein it, exclaimed, "The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!"The exclamation, to me so surprising--for why was Miss West an arrantfeminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement aboutthe other sex?--was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was aprotest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself.Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing themagic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice itsnatural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swampand jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We shouldstill be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bonesand bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament tookour unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would neverhave existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns orlost them. Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors areessential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon andMussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, forif they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves toexplain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And itserves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; howimpossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this pictureis feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain androusing 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-glassshrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on givingjudgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing upand speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast andat dinner at least twice the size he really is? So I reflected,crumbling my bread and stirring my coffee and now and again looking atthe people in the street. The looking-glass vision is of supremeimportance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervoussystem. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived ofhis cocaine. Under the spell of that illusion, I thought, looking out ofthe window, half the people on the pavement are striding to work. Theyput on their hats and coats in the morning under its agreeable rays.They start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired atMiss 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 theyspeak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have hadsuch profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notesin the margin of the private mind.

But these contributions to the dangerous and fascinating subject of thepsychology of the other sex--it is one, I hope, that you willinvestigate when you have five hundred a year of your own--wereinterrupted by the necessity of paying the bill. It came to fiveshillings and ninepence. I gave the waiter a ten-shilling note and hewent to bring me change. There was another ten-shilling note in mypurse; I noticed it, because it is a fact that still takes my breathaway--the power of my purse to breed ten-shilling notes automatically. Iopen it and there they are. Society gives me chicken and coffee, bed andlodging, in return for a certain number of pieces of paper which wereleft 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 whenshe was riding out to take the air in Bombay. The news of my legacyreached me one night about the same time that the act was passed thatgave votes to women. A solicitor's letter fell into the post-box andwhen I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a yearfor ever. Of the two--the vote and the money--the money, I own, seemedinfinitely the more important. Before that I had made my living bycadging odd jobs from newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or awedding there; I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes,reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabetto small children in a kindergarten. Such were the chief occupationsthat were open to women before 1918. I need not, I am afraid, describein any detail the hardness of the work, for you know perhaps women whohave done it; nor the difficulty of living on the money when it wasearned, for you may have tried. But what still remains with me as aworse infliction than either was the poison of fear and bitterness whichthose days bred in me. To begin with, always to be doing work that onedid not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning,not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakeswere too great to run risks; and then the thought of that one gift whichit was death to hide--a small one but dear to the possessor--perishingand with it my self, my soul,--all this became like a rust eating awaythe bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart. However, as Isay, my aunt died; and whenever I change a ten-shilling note a little ofthat rust and corrosion is rubbed off; fear and bitterness go. Indeed, Ithought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable,remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper afixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me myfive hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine for ever.Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred andbitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need notflatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I foundmyself 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 ofpeople are never responsible for what they do. They are driven byinstincts which are not within their control. They too, the patriarchs,the professors, had endless difficulties, terrible drawbacks to contendwith. Their education had been in some ways as faulty as my own. It hadbred in them defects as great. True, they had money and power, but onlyat the cost of harbouring in their breasts an eagle, a vulture, for evertearing the liver out and plucking at the lungs--the instinct forpossession, the rage for acquisition which drives them to desire otherpeople's fields and goods perpetually; to make frontiers and flags;battleships and poison gas; to offer up their own lives and theirchildren's lives. Walk through the Admiralty Arch (I had reached thatmonument), or any other avenue given up to trophies and cannon, andreflect upon the kind of glory celebrated there. Or watch in the springsunshine the stockbroker and the great barrister going indoors to makemoney and more money and more money when it is a fact that five hundredpounds a year will keep one alive in the sunshine. These are unpleasantinstincts to harbour, I reflected. They are bred of the conditions oflife; of the lack of civilisation, I thought, looking at the statue ofthe Duke of Cambridge, and in particular at the feathers in his cockedhat, with a fixity that they have scarcely ever received before. And, asI realised these drawbacks, by degrees fear and bitterness modifiedthemselves into pity and toleration; and then in a year or two, pity andtoleration went, and the greatest release of all came, which is freedomto think of things in themselves. That building, for example, do I likeit or not? Is that picture beautiful or not? Is that in my opinion agood book or a bad? Indeed my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me, andsubstituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, whichMilton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.

So thinking, so speculating I found my way back to my house by theriver. Lamps were being lit and an indescribable change had come overLondon since the morning hour. It was as if the great machine afterlabouring all day had made with our help a few yards of something veryexciting and beautiful--a fiery fabric flashing with red eyes, a tawnymonster roaring with hot breath. Even the wind seemed flung like a flagas it lashed the houses and rattled the hoardings.

In my little street, however, domesticity prevailed. The house painterwas descending his ladder; the nursemaid was wheeling the perambulatorcarefully in and out back to nursery tea; the coal-heaver was foldinghis empty sacks on top of each other; the woman who keeps thegreengrocer's shop was adding up the day's takings with her hands in redmittens. But so engrossed was I with the problem you have laid upon myshoulders that I could not see even these usual sights without referringthem to one centre. I thought how much harder it is now than it musthave been even a century ago to say which of these employments is thehigher, the more necessary. Is it better to be a coal-heaver or anursemaid; is the charwoman who has brought up eight children of lessvalue to the world than the barrister who has made a hundred thousandpounds? It is useless to ask such questions; for nobody can answer them.Not only do the comparative values of charwomen and lawyers rise andfall from decade to decade, but we have no rods with which to measurethem even as they are at the moment. I had been foolish to ask myprofessor to furnish me with "indisputable proofs" of this or that inhis argument about women. Even if one could state the value of any onegift at the moment, those values will change; in a century's time verypossibly they will have changed completely. Moreover, in a hundredyears, I thought, reaching my own doorstep, women will have ceased to bethe protected sex. Logically they will take part in all the activitiesand exertions that were once denied them. The nursemaid will heave coal.The shopwoman will drive an engine. All assumptions founded on the factsobserved when women were the protected sex will have disappeared--as,for example (here a squad of soldiers marched down the street), thatwomen and clergymen and gardeners live longer than other people. Removethat protection, expose them to the same exertions and activities, makethem soldiers and sailors and engine-drivers and dock labourers, andwill not women die off so much younger, so much quicker, than men thatone will say, "I saw a woman to-day", as one used to say, "I saw anaeroplane". Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be aprotected occupation, I thought, opening the door. But what bearing hasall this upon the subject of my paper, Women and Fiction? I asked, goingindoors.

CHAPTER III

It was disappointing not to have brought back in the evening someimportant statement, some authentic fact. Women are poorer than menbecause--this or that. Perhaps now it would be better to give up seekingfor the truth, and receiving on one's head an avalanche of opinion hotas lava, discoloured as dish-water. It would be better to draw thecurtains; to shut out distractions; to light the lamp; to narrow theenquiry and to ask the historian, who records not opinions but facts, todescribe under what conditions women lived, not throughout the ages, butin England, say in the time of Elizabeth.

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of thatextraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable ofsong or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I askedmyself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like apebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider'sweb, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at allfour corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible;Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete bythemselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge,torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun inmid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering humanbeings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health andmoney and the houses we live in.

I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took downone of the latest, Professor Trevelyan's History of England. Once moreI looked up Women, found "position of" and turned to the pagesindicated. "Wife-beating," I read, "was a recognised right of man, andwas practised without shame by high as well as low.... Similarly," thehistorian goes on, "the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman ofher parents' choice was liable to be locked up, beaten and flung aboutthe room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion. Marriagewas not an affair of personal affection, but of family avarice,particularly in the 'chivalrous' upper classes.... Betrothal often tookplace while one or both of the parties was in the cradle, and marriagewhen they were scarcely out of the nurses' charge." That was about 1470,soon after Chaucer's time. The next reference to the position of womenis some two hundred years later, in the time of the Stuarts. "It wasstill the exception for women of the upper and middle class to choosetheir own husbands, and when the husband had been assigned, he was lordand master, so far at least as law and custom could make him. Yet evenso," Professor Trevelyan concludes, "neither Shakespeare's women northose of authentic seventeenth-century memoirs, like the Verneys and theHutchinsons, seem wanting in personality and character." Certainly, ifwe 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 thetruth when he remarks that Shakespeare's women do not seem wanting inpersonality and character. Not being a historian, one might go evenfurther and say that women have burnt like beacons in all the works ofall the poets from the beginning of time--Clytemnestra, Antigone,Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phèdre, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona, theDuchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then among the prose writers:Millamant, Clarissa, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenine, Emma Bovary, Madame deGuermantes--the names flock to mind, nor do they recall women "lackingin personality and character." Indeed, if woman had no existence save inthe fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmostimportance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid;infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, somethink even greater.[6]But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out,she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

[Footnote 6]"It remains a strange and almost inexplicable fact that in Athena'scity, where women were kept in almost Oriental suppression as odalisquesor drudges, the stage should yet have produced figures like Clytemnestraand Cassandra Atossa and Antigone, Phèdre and Medea, and all the otherheroines who dominate play after play of the 'misogynist' Euripides. Butthe paradox of this world where in real life a respectable woman couldhardly show her face alone in the street, and yet on the stage womanequals or surpasses man, has never been satisfactorily explained. Inmodern tragedy the same predominance exists. At all events, a verycursory survey of Shakespeare's work (similarly with Webster, though notwith Marlowe or Jonson) suffices to reveal how this dominance, thisinitiative of women, persists from Rosalind to Lady Macbeth. So too inRacine; six of his tragedies bear their heroines' names; and what malecharacters of his shall we set against Hermione and Andromaque, Béréniceand Roxane, Phèdre and Athalie? So again with Ibsen; what men shall wematch with Solveig and Nora, Heda and Hilda Wangel and RebeccaWest?"--F. L. Lucas, Tragedy, pp. 114-15.

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of thehighest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. Shepervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact shewas 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 inliterature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, couldscarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading thehistorians first and the poets afterwards--a worm winged like an eagle;the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet. But thesemonsters, however amusing to the imagination, have no existence in fact.What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically andprosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch withfact--that she is Mrs. Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearinga black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fictioneither--that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forcesare coursing and flashing perpetually. The moment, however, that onetries this method with the Elizabethan woman, one branch of illuminationfails; one is held up by the scarcity of facts. One knows nothingdetailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. Historyscarcely mentions her. And I turned to Professor Trevelyan again to seewhat history meant to him. I found by looking at his chapter headingsthat it meant--

"The Manor Court and the Methods of Open-field Agriculture... TheCistercians and Sheep-farming... The Crusades... The University... TheHouse 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... TheArmada..." and so on. Occasionally an individual woman is mentioned, anElizabeth, or a Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible meanscould middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at theircommand have taken part in any one of the great movements which, broughttogether, constitute the historian's view of the past. Nor shall we findher in any collection of anecdotes. Aubrey hardly mentions her. Shenever writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only ahandful of her letters in existence. She left no plays or poems by whichwe can judge her. What one wants, I thought--and why does not somebrilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it?--is a mass ofinformation; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as arule; what was her house like; had she a room to herself; did she do thecooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts liesomewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the lifeof the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere,could one collect it and make a book of it. It would be ambitious beyondmy daring, I thought, looking about the shelves for books that were notthere, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that theyshould rewrite history, though I own that it often seems a little queeras it is, unreal, lop-sided; but why should they not add a supplement tohistory? calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so that womenmight figure there without impropriety? For one often catches a glimpseof them in the lives of the great, whisking away into the background,concealing, I sometimes think, a wink, a laugh, perhaps a tear. And,after all, we have lives enough of Jane Austen; it scarcely seemsnecessary to consider again the influence of the tragedies of JoannaBaillie upon the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe; as for myself, I should notmind if the homes and haunts of Mary Russell Mitford were closed to thepublic for a century at least. But what I find deplorable, I continued,looking about the bookshelves again, is that nothing is known aboutwomen before the eighteenth century. I have no model in my mind to turnabout this way and that. Here am I asking why women did not write poetryin the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated;whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms tothemselves; 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 weremarried whether they liked it or not before they were out of thenursery, at fifteen or sixteen very likely. It would have been extremelyodd, even upon this showing, had one of them suddenly written the playsof Shakespeare, I concluded, and I thought of that old gentleman, who isdead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossiblefor any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius ofShakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a lady whoapplied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact goto heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How muchthinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders ofignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Womencannot write the plays of Shakespeare.

Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the worksof Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this;it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman tohave written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let meimagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happenedhad Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let ussay. Shakespeare himself went, very probably,--his mother was anheiress--to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin--Ovid,Virgil and Horace--and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it iswell known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, andhad, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in theneighbourhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. Thatescapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, ataste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door.Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, andlived 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 hisextraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She wasas adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. Butshe was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar andlogic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book nowand then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But thenher parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stewand not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharplybut kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions oflife for a woman and loved their daughter--indeed, more likely than notshe was the apple of her father's eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pagesup in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fireto them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to bebetrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried out thatmarriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by herfather. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurthim, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give hera chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears inhis eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? Theforce of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcelof her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night andtook the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang inthe hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickestfancy, a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, shehad a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted toact, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager--a fat, loose-lippedman--guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and womenacting--no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted--youcan imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she evenseek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet hergenius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives ofmen and women and the study of their ways. At last--for she was veryyoung, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same greyeyes and rounded brows--at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pityon her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so--who shallmeasure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught andtangled in a woman's body?--killed herself one winter's night and liesburied at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside theElephant and Castle.

That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman inShakespeare's day had had Shakespeare's genius. But for my part, I agreewith the deceased bishop, if such he was--it is unthinkable that anywoman in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius. Forgenius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated,servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and theBritons. It is not born to-day among the working classes. How, then,could it have been born among women whose work began, according toProfessor Trevelyan, almost before they were out of the nursery, whowere forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power oflaw and custom? Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as itmust have existed among the working classes. Now and again an EmilyBrontë or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. Butcertainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of awitch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise womanselling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then Ithink we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of somemute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brainsout on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with thetorture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guessthat Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often awoman. It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald, I think, suggested who made theballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling herspinning 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 init, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare's sister as Ihad made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenthcentury would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended herdays in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, halfwizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology tobe sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift forpoetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, sotortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she musthave lost her health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could havewalked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into thepresence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence andsuffering an anguish which may have been irrational--for chastity may bea fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons--but werenone the less inevitable. Chastity had then, it has even now, areligious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself roundwith nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the lightof day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life inLondon in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who waspoet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well havekilled her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have beentwisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination.And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are noplays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she wouldhave sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity thatdictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century.Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strifeas their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves byusing the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention, whichif not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (thechief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself amuch-talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymityruns in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. Theyare not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are,and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost withoutfeeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it, as Alf, Bert orChas. must do in obedience to their instinct, which murmurs if it sees afine woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien est à moi. And, of course, itmay not be a dog, I thought, remembering Parliament Square, the SiegesAllee and other avenues; it may be a piece of land or a man with curlyblack hair. It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that onecan pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make anEnglishwoman of her.

That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenthcentury, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself. Allthe conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to thestate of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain. Butwhat is the state of mind that is most propitious to the act ofcreation, I asked? Can one come by any notion of the state that furthersand makes possible that strange activity? Here I opened the volumecontaining the Tragedies of Shakespeare. What was Shakespeare's state ofmind, for instance, when he wrote Lear and Antony and Cleopatra? Itwas certainly the state of mind most favourable to poetry that there hasever existed. But Shakespeare himself said nothing about it. We onlyknow casually and by chance that he "never blotted a line". Nothingindeed was ever said by the artist himself about his state of mind untilthe eighteenth century perhaps. Rousseau perhaps began it. At any rate,by the nineteenth century self-consciousness had developed so far thatit was the habit for men of letters to describe their minds inconfessions and autobiographies. Their lives also were written, andtheir letters were printed after their deaths. Thus, though we do notknow what Shakespeare went through when he wrote Lear, we do know whatCarlyle went through when he wrote the French Revolution; whatFlaubert went through when he wrote Madame Bovary; what Keats wasgoing through when he tried to write poetry against the coming of deathand the indifference of the world.

And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession andself-analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat ofprodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it willcome from the writer's mind whole and entire. Generally materialcircumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt;money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating allthese difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world'snotorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novelsand histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubertfinds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this orthat fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And sothe writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in thecreative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. Acurse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis andconfession. "Mighty poets in their misery dead"--that is the burden oftheir song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is amiracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it wasconceived.

But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, thesedifficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, tohave 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 orvery noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Sinceher pin money, which depended on the goodwill of her father, was onlyenough to keep her clothed, she was debarred from such alleviations ascame even to Keats or Tennyson or Carlyle, all poor men, from a walkingtour, a little journey to France, from the separate lodging which, evenif it were miserable enough, sheltered them from the claims andtyrannies of their families. Such material difficulties were formidable;but much worse were the immaterial. The indifference of the world whichKeats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bearwas in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say toher as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference tome. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What's the good of yourwriting? Here the psychologists of Newnham and Girton might come to ourhelp, I thought, looking again at the blank spaces on the shelves. Forsurely it is time that the effect of discouragement upon the mind of theartist should be measured, as I have seen a dairy company measure theeffect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of the rat. Theyset 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 fooddo we feed women as artists upon? I asked, remembering, I suppose, thatdinner of prunes and custard. To answer that question I had only to openthe evening paper and to read that Lord Birkenhead is of opinion--butreally I am not going to trouble to copy out Lord Birkenhead's opinionupon the writing of women. What Dean Inge says I will leave in peace.The Harley Street specialist may be allowed to rouse the echoes ofHarley Street with his vociferations without raising a hair on my head.I will quote, however, Mr. Oscar Browning, because Mr. Oscar Browningwas a great figure in Cambridge at one time, and used to examine thestudents at Girton and Newnham. Mr. Oscar Browning was wont to declare"that the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set ofexamination papers, was that, irrespective of the marks he might give,the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man". Aftersaying that Mr. Browning went back to his rooms--and it is this sequelthat endears him and makes him a human figure of some bulk andmajesty--he went back to his rooms and found a stable-boy lying on thesofa--"a mere skeleton, his cheeks were cavernous and sallow, his teethwere 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 mosthigh-minded.'" The two pictures always seem to me to complete eachother. And happily in this age of biography the two pictures often docomplete each other, so that we are able to interpret the opinions ofgreat men not only by what they say, but by what they do.

But though this is possible now, such opinions coming from the lips ofimportant people must have been formidable enough even fifty years ago.Let us suppose that a father from the highest motives did not wish hisdaughter to leave home and become writer, painter or scholar. "See whatMr. Oscar Browning says," he would say; and there was not only Mr. OscarBrowning; there was the Saturday Review; there was Mr. Greg--the"essentials of a woman's being," said Mr. Greg emphatically, "are thatthey are supported by, and they minister to, men"--there was anenormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could beexpected of women intellectually. Even if her father did not read outloud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself; and thereading, even in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality,and told profoundly upon her work. There would always have been thatassertion--you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that--toprotest against, to overcome. Probably for a novelist this germ is nolonger of much effect; for there have been women novelists of merit. Butfor painters it must still have some sting in it; and for musicians, Iimagine, is even now active and poisonous in the extreme. The womancomposer stands where the actress stood in the time of Shakespeare. NickGreene, I thought, remembering the story I had made about Shakespeare'ssister, 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 wordsused 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 dictumconcerning a woman preacher, transposed into terms of music. 'Sir, awoman's composing is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is notdone well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.'"[7]So accurately does history repeat itself.

[Footnote 7]A Survey of Contemporary Music, Cecil Gray, p. 246.

Thus, I concluded, shutting Mr. Oscar Browning's life and pushing awaythe rest, it is fairly evident that even in the nineteenth century awoman was not encouraged to be an artist. On the contrary, she wassnubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted. Her mind must have beenstrained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, ofdisproving that. For here again we come within range of that veryinteresting and obscure masculine complex which has had so muchinfluence upon the woman's movement; that deep-seated desire, not somuch that she shall be inferior as that he shall be superior, whichplants him wherever one looks, not only in front of the arts, butbarring the way to politics too, even when the risk to himself seemsinfinitesimal and the suppliant humble and devoted. Even LadyBessborough, I remembered, with all her passion for politics, musthumbly bow herself and write to Lord Granville Leveson-Gower: "...notwithstanding all my violence in politicks and talking so much on thatsubject, I perfectly agree with you that no woman has any business tomeddle with that or any other serious business, farther than giving heropinion (if she is ask'd)." And so she goes on to spend her enthusiasmwhere it meets with no obstacle whatsoever, upon that immenselyimportant subject, Lord Granville's maiden speech in the House ofCommons. The spectacle is certainly a strange one, I thought. Thehistory of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interestingperhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. An amusing bookmight be made of it if some young student at Girton or Newnham wouldcollect examples and deduce a theory,--but she would need thick gloveson her hands, and bars to protect her of solid gold.

But what is amusing now, I recollected, shutting Lady Bessborough, hadto be taken in desperate earnest once. Opinions that one now pastes in abook labelled cock-a-doodle-dum and keeps for reading to selectaudiences on summer nights once drew tears, I can assure you. Among yourgrandmothers and great-grandmothers there were many that wept their eyesout. Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony.[8]Moreover, it is all very well for you, who have got yourselves to college and enjoysitting-rooms--or is it only bed-sitting-rooms?--of your own to say thatgenius should disregard such opinions; that genius should be abovecaring what is said of it. Unfortunately, it is precisely the men orwomen 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 veryunfortunate, fact that it is the nature of the artist to mindexcessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with thewreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

[Footnote 8]See Cassandra, by Florence Nightingale, printed in The Cause, by R.Strachey.

And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate, I thought,returning again to my original enquiry into what state of mind is mostpropitious for creative work, because the mind of an artist, in order toachieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work thatis in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare's mind, I conjectured,looking at the book which lay open at Antony and Cleopatra. There mustbe no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

For though we say that we know nothing about Shakespeare's state ofmind, even as we say that, we are saying something about Shakespeare'sstate of mind. The reason perhaps why we know so little ofShakespeare--compared with Donne or Ben Jonson or Milton--is that hisgrudges and spites and antipathies are hidden from us. We are not heldup by some "revelation" which reminds us of the writer. All desire toprotest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to makethe world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of himand consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded. Ifever a human being got his work expressed completely, it wasShakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought,turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare's mind.

CHAPTER IV

That one would find any woman in that state of mind in the sixteenthcentury was obviously impossible. One has only to think of theElizabethan tombstones with all those children kneeling with claspedhands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses with their dark,cramped rooms, to realise that no woman could have written poetry then.What one would expect to find would be that rather later perhaps somegreat lady would take advantage of her comparative freedom and comfortto publish something with her name to it and risk being thought amonster. Men, of course, are not snobs, I continued, carefully eschewing"the arrant feminism" of Miss Rebecca West; but they appreciate withsympathy for the most part the efforts of a countess to write verse. Onewould expect to find a lady of title meeting with far greaterencouragement than an unknown Miss Austen or a Miss Brontë at that timewould have met with. But one would also expect to find that her mind wasdisturbed by alien emotions like fear and hatred and that her poemsshowed traces of that disturbance. Here is Lady Winchilsea, for example,I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year 1661; she wasnoble both by birth and by marriage; she was childless; she wrotepoetry, and one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out inindignation against the position of women:

How are we 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 becomeincandescent". On the contrary, it is harassed and distracted with hatesand grievances. The human race is split up for her into two parties. Menare the "opposing faction"; men are hated and feared, because they havethe 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 shewrites 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 fearand not heaped it with bitterness and resentment, the fire was hotwithin 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, whosemind was tuned to nature and reflection, should have been forced toanger and bitterness. But how could she have helped herself? I asked,imagining the sneers and the laughter, the adulation of the toadies, thescepticism of the professional poet. She must have shut herself up in aroom in the country to write, and been torn asunder by bitterness andscruples perhaps, though her husband was of the kindest, and theirmarried life perfection. She "must have", I say, because when one comesto seek out the facts about Lady Winchilsea, one finds, as usual, thatalmost nothing is known about her. She suffered terribly frommelancholy, which we can explain at least to some extent when we findher 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, theharmless 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 couldonly expect to be laughed at; and, accordingly, Pope or Gay is said tohave satirised her "as a blue-stocking with an itch for scribbling".Also it is thought that she offended Gay by laughing at him. She saidthat his Trivia showed that "he was more proper to walk before a chairthan 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 shouldhave liked to have had more even of dubious gossip so that I might havefound out or made up some image of this melancholy lady, who lovedwandering in the fields and thinking about unusual things and scorned,so rashly, so unwisely, "the dull manage of a servile house". But shebecame diffuse, Mr. Murry says. Her gift is all grown about with weedsand bound with briars. It had no chance of showing itself for the finedistinguished gift it was. And so, putting her back on the shelf, Iturned to the other great lady, the Duchess whom Lamb loved,hare-brained, fantastical Margaret of Newcastle, her elder, but hercontemporary. They were very different, but alike in this that both werenoble and both childless, and both were married to the best of husbands.In both burnt the same passion for poetry and both are disfigured anddeformed by the same causes. Open the Duchess and one finds the sameoutburst of rage, "Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, anddie like Worms...." Margaret too might have been a poet; in our day allthat activity would have turned a wheel of some sort. As it was, whatcould bind, tame or civilise for human use that wild, generous,untutored intelligence? It poured itself out, higgledy-piggledy, intorrents of rhyme and prose, poetry and philosophy which stand congealedin quartos and folios that nobody ever reads. She should have had amicroscope put in her hand. She should have been taught to look at thestars and reason scientifically. Her wits were turned with solitude andfreedom. No one checked her. No one taught her. The professors fawned onher. At Court they jeered at her. Sir Egerton Brydges complained of hercoarseness--"as flowing from a female of high rank brought up in theCourts". She shut herself up at Welbeck alone.

What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendishbrings to mind! as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all theroses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death. What awaste that the woman who wrote "the best bred women are those whoseminds are civilest" should have frittered her time away scribblingnonsense and plunging ever deeper into obscurity and folly till thepeople crowded round her coach when she issued out. Evidently the crazyDuchess became a bogey to frighten clever girls with. Here, Iremembered, putting away the Duchess and opening Dorothy Osborne'sletters, is Dorothy writing to Temple about the Duchess's new book."Sure the poore woman is a little distracted, shee could never bee soerediculous else as to venture at writeing book's and in verse too, if Ishould 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 intemper, wrote nothing. Letters did not count. A woman might writeletters while she was sitting by her father's sick-bed. She could writethem by the fire whilst the men talked without disturbing them. Thestrange thing is, I thought, turning over the pages of Dorothy'sletters, what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framingof 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 Iam gon. the heat of the day is spent in reading or working and aboutsixe or seven a Clock, I walke out into a Common that lyes hard by thehouse where a great many young wenches keep Sheep and Cow's and sitt inthe shades singing of Ballads; I goe to them and compare their voycesand Beauty's to some Ancient Shepherdesses that I have read of and findea vaste difference there, but trust mee I think these are as innocent asthose could bee. I talke to them, and finde they want nothing to makethem the happiest People in the world, but the knoledge that they aresoe. most commonly when we are in the middest of our discourse one looksaboute her and spyes her Cow's goeing into the Corne and then away theyall run, as if they had wing's at theire heels. I that am not soe nimblestay behinde, and when I see them driveing home theire Cattle I thinktis time for mee to retyre too. when I have supped I goe into the Gardenand soe to the syde of a small River that runs by it where I sitt downeand 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"--onecan measure the opposition that was in the air to a woman writing whenone finds that even a woman with a great turn for writing has broughtherself to believe that to write a book was to be ridiculous, even toshow oneself distracted. And so we come, I continued, replacing thesingle 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 leavebehind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary greatladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delightalone. We come to town and rub shoulders with ordinary people in thestreets. Mrs. Behn was a middle-class woman with all the plebeianvirtues of humour, vitality and courage; a woman forced by the death ofher husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make herliving 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 factoutweighs anything that she actually wrote, even the splendid "AThousand Martyrs I have made", or "Love in Fantastic Triumph sat", forhere begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that inthe course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes. For nowthat 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 coursethe answer for many years to come was, Yes, by living the life of AphraBehn! Death would be better! and the door was slammed faster than ever.That profoundly interesting subject, the value that men set upon women'schastity and its effect upon their education, here suggests itself fordiscussion, and might provide an interesting book if any student atGirton or Newnham cared to go into the matter. Lady Dudley, sitting indiamonds among the midges of a Scottish moor, might serve forfrontispiece. Lord Dudley, The Times said when Lady Dudley died theother day, "a man of cultivated taste and many accomplishments, wasbenevolent and bountiful, but whimsically despotic. He insisted upon hiswife's wearing full dress, even at the remotest shooting-lodge in theHighlands; he loaded her with gorgeous jewels", and so on, "he gave hereverything--always excepting any measure of responsibility". Then LordDudley had a stroke and she nursed him and ruled his estates withsupreme competence for ever after. That whimsical despotism was in thenineteenth century too.

But to return. Aphra Behn proved that money could be made by writing atthe sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so bydegrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind,but was of practical importance. A husband might die, or some disasterovertake the family. Hundreds of women began as the eighteenth centurydrew on to add to their pin money, or to come to the rescue of theirfamilies by making translations or writing the innumerable bad novelswhich have ceased to be recorded even in text-books, but are to bepicked up in the fourpenny boxes in the Charing Cross Road. The extremeactivity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth centuryamong women--the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays onShakespeare, the translating of the classics--was founded on the solidfact that women could make money by writing. Money dignifies what isfrivolous if unpaid for. It might still be well to sneer at "bluestockings with an itch for scribbling", but it could not be denied thatthey could put money in their purses. Thus, towards the end of theeighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewritinghistory, I should describe more fully and think of greater importancethan the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman beganto write. For if Pride and Prejudice matters, and Middlemarch andVillette and Wuthering Heights matter, then it matters far more thanI can prove in an hour's discourse that women generally, and not merelythe lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios andher flatterers, took to writing. Without those forerunners, Jane Austenand the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written thanShakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe withoutChaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways andtamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are notsingle and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years ofthinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that theexperience of the mass is behind the single voice. Jane Austen shouldhave laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot donehomage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter--the valiant old woman whotied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learnGreek. All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb ofAphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, inWestminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speaktheir minds. It is she--shady and amorous as she was--who makes it notquite fantastic for me to say to you to-night: Earn five hundred a yearby your wits.

Here, then, one had reached the early nineteenth century. And here, forthe first time, I found several shelves given up entirely to the worksof 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 impulsewas to poetry. The "supreme head of song" was a poetess. Both in Franceand in England the women poets precede the women novelists. Moreover, Ithought, looking at the four famous names, what had George Eliot incommon with Emily Brontë? Did not Charlotte Brontë fail entirely tounderstand Jane Austen? Save for the possibly relevant fact that not oneof them had a child, four more incongruous characters could not have mettogether in a room--so much so that it is tempting to invent a meetingand a dialogue between them. Yet by some strange force they were allcompelled when they wrote, to write novels. Had it something to do withbeing born of the middle class, I asked; and with the fact, which MissEmily Davies a little later was so strikingly to demonstrate, that themiddle-class family in the early nineteenth century was possessed onlyof a single sitting-room between them? If a woman wrote, she would haveto write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was sovehemently to complain,--"women never have an half hour... that they cancall their own"--she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier towrite prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Lessconcentration is required. Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of herdays. "How she was able to effect all this," her nephew writes in hisMemoir, "is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, andmost of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room,subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that heroccupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or anypersons beyond her own family party".[9]Jane Austen hid her manuscriptsor covered them with a piece of blotting-paper. Then, again, all theliterary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century wastraining in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion.Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of thecommon sitting-room. People's feelings were impressed on her; personalrelations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the middle-classwoman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels, even though, as seemsevident enough, two of the four famous women here named were not bynature novelists. Emily Brontë should have written poetic plays; theoverflow of George Eliot's capacious mind should have spread itself whenthe creative impulse was spent upon history or biography. They wrotenovels, however; one may even go further, I said, taking Pride andPrejudice from the shelf, and say that they wrote good novels. Withoutboasting or giving pain to the opposite sex, one may say that Pride andPrejudice is a good book. At any rate, one would not have been ashamedto have been caught in the act of writing Pride and Prejudice. YetJane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide hermanuscript before anyone came in. To Jane Austen there was somethingdiscreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice. And, I wondered, wouldPride and Prejudice have been a better novel if Jane Austen had notthought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? I read a pageor two to see; but I could not find any signs that her circumstances hadharmed her work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracleabout 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 andCleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, theymay mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and forthat 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, andso does Shakespeare. If Jane Austen suffered in any way from hercircumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed uponher. It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She nevertravelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had luncheonin a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen notto want what she had not. Her gift and her circumstances matched eachother completely. But I doubt whether that was true of Charlotte Brontë,I said, opening Jane Eyre and laying it beside Pride and Prejudice.

[Footnote 9]Memoir of Jane Austen, by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh

I opened it at chapter twelve and my eye was caught by the phrase"Anybody may blame me who likes". What were they blaming CharlotteBrontë for? I wondered. And I read how Jane Eyre used to go up on to theroof when Mrs. Fairfax was making jellies and looked over the fields atthe distant view. And then she longed--and it was for this that theyblamed her--that "then I longed for a power of vision which mightoverpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regionsfull of life I had heard of but never seen: that then I desired more ofpractical 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 Adèle; butI 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 be called discontented. Icould not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me topain 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 insilent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellionsferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed tobe very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they needexercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much astheir brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolutea stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded intheir more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confinethemselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on thepiano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laughat them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom haspronounced 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 GracePoole all of a sudden. The continuity is disturbed. One might say, Icontinued, laying the book down beside Pride and Prejudice, that thewoman who wrote those pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen; butif 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 whereshe should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should writewisely. She will write of herself where she should write of hercharacters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but dieyoung, cramped and thwarted?

One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what might havehappened if Charlotte Brontë had possessed say three hundred a year--butthe foolish woman sold the copyright of her novels outright for fifteenhundred pounds; had somehow possessed more knowledge of the busy world,and towns and regions full of life; more practical experience, andintercourse with her kind and acquaintance with a variety of character.In those words she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defectsas a novelist but upon those of her sex at that time. She knew, no onebetter, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had notspent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience andintercourse and travel had been granted her. But they were not granted;they were withheld; and we must accept the fact that all those goodnovels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, werewritten by women without more experience of life than could enter thehouse of a respectable clergyman; written too in the common sitting-roomof that respectable house and by women so poor that they could notafford to buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which towrite Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. One of them, it is true,George Eliot, escaped after much tribulation, but only to a secludedvilla in St. John's Wood. And there she settled down in the shadow ofthe world's disapproval. "I wish it to be understood", she wrote, "thatI should never invite anyone to come and see me who did not ask for theinvitation"; for was she not living in sin with a married man and mightnot the sight of her damage the chastity of Mrs. Smith or whoever itmight 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 theother side of Europe, there was a young man living freely with thisgipsy or with that great lady; going to the wars; picking up unhinderedand uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served himso splendidly later when he came to write his books. Had Tolstoi livedat the Priory in seclusion with a married lady "cut off from what iscalled 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 ofnovel-writing and the effect of sex upon the novelist. If one shutsone's eyes and thinks of the novel as a whole, it would seem to be acreation owning a certain looking-glass likeness to life, though ofcourse with simplifications and distortions innumerable. At any rate, itis a structure leaving a shape on the mind's eye, built now in squares,now pagoda shaped, now throwing out wings and arcades, now solidlycompact and domed like the Cathedral of Saint Sofia at Constantinople.This shape, I thought, thinking back over certain famous novels, startsin one the kind of emotion that is appropriate to it. But that emotionat once blends itself with others, for the "shape" is not made by therelation of stone to stone, but by the relation of human being to humanbeing. Thus a novel starts in us all sorts of antagonistic and opposedemotions. Life conflicts with something that is not life. Hence thedifficulty of coming to any agreement about novels, and the immense swaythat our private prejudices have upon us. On the one hand, we feelYou--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 ofthe 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 ofman I most detest, one says. Or, This is a farrago of absurdity. I couldnever feel anything of the sort myself. The whole structure, it isobvious, thinking back on any famous novel, is one of infinitecomplexity, because it is thus made up of so many different judgements,of so many different kinds of emotion. The wonder is that any book socomposed holds together for more than a year or two, or can possiblymean to the English reader what it means for the Russian or the Chinese.But they do hold together occasionally very remarkably. And what holdsthem together in these rare instances of survival (I was thinking ofWar and Peace) is something that one calls integrity, though it hasnothing to do with paying one's bills or behaving honourably in anemergency. What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, isthe 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 knownpeople behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, soit happens. One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as onereads--for Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an innerlight by which to judge of the novelist's integrity or disintegrity. Orperhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, hastraced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition whichthese great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to thefire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees itcome to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have alwaysfelt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and,shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were somethingvery precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts itback on the shelf, I said, taking War and Peace and putting it back inits place. If, on the other hand, these poor sentences that one takesand tests rouse first a quick and eager response with their brightcolouring and their dashing gestures but there they stop: somethingseems to check them in their development: or if they bring to light onlya faint scribble in that corner and a blot over there, and nothingappears whole and entire, then one heaves a sigh of disappointment andsays, Another failure. This novel has come to grief somewhere.

And for the most part, of course, novels do come to grief somewhere. Theimagination falters under the enormous strain. The insight is confused;it can no longer distinguish between the true and the false; it has nolonger the strength to go on with the vast labour that calls at everymoment for the use of so many different faculties. But how would allthis be affected by the sex of the novelist, I wondered, looking atJane Eyre and the others. Would the fact of her sex in any wayinterfere with the integrity of a woman novelist--that integrity which Itake to be the backbone of the writer? Now, in the passages I havequoted from Jane Eyre, it is clear that anger was tampering with theintegrity of Charlotte Brontë the novelist. She left her story, to whichher entire devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance. Sheremembered that she had been starved of her proper due ofexperience--she had been made to stagnate in a parsonage mendingstockings when she wanted to wander free over the world. Her imaginationswerved from indignation and we feel it swerve. But there were many moreinfluences than anger tugging at her imagination and deflecting it fromits path. Ignorance, for instance. The portrait of Rochester is drawn inthe dark. We feel the influence of fear in it; just as we constantlyfeel an acidity which is the result of oppression, a buried sufferingsmouldering 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 areto some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values ofwomen differ very often from the values which have been made by theother sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values thatprevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; theworship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial". And these valuesare inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an importantbook, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is aninsignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in adrawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scenein a shop--everywhere and much more subtly the difference of valuepersists. The whole structure, therefore, of the earlynineteenth-century novel was raised, if one was a woman, by a mind whichwas slightly pulled from the straight, and made to alter its clearvision in deference to external authority. One has only to skim thoseold forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they arewritten to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was sayingthis by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. She wasadmitting that she was "only a woman", or protesting that she was "asgood as a man". She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, withdocility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. It does not matterwhich 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 ofit. And I thought of all the women's novels that lie scattered, likesmall pock-marked apples in an orchard, about the second-hand book shopsof London. It was the flaw in the centre that had rotted them. She hadaltered her values in deference to the opinion of others.

But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to theright or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have requiredin face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchalsociety, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking.Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhapsthe finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write.Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirelyignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue--write this,think that. They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, nowgrumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked,now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, butmust be at them, like some too conscientious governess, adjuring them,like Sir Egerton Brydges, to be refined; dragging even into thecriticism of poetry criticism of sex;[10]admonishing them, if theywould be good and win, as I suppose, some shiny prize, to keep withincertain limits which the gentleman in question thinks suitable--"...female novelists should only aspire to excellence by courageouslyacknowledging the limitations of their sex".[11]That puts the matter ina nutshell, and when I tell you, rather to your surprise, that thissentence was written not in August 1828 but in August 1928, you willagree, I think, that however delightful it is to us now, it represents avast body of opinion--I am not going to stir those old pools; I takeonly what chance has floated to my feet--that was far more vigorous andfar more vocal a century ago. It would have needed a very stalwart youngwoman in 1828 to disregard all those snubs and chidings and promises ofprizes. 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.

[Footnote 10]"[She] has a metaphysical purpose, and that is a dangerous obsession,especially with a woman, for women rarely possess men's healthy love ofrhetoric. It is a strange lack in the sex which is in other things moreprimitive and more materialistic."--New Criterion, June 1928.

[Footnote 11]"If, like the reporter, you believe that female novelists should onlyaspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations oftheir sex (Jane Austen [has] demonstrated how gracefully this gesturecan be accomplished ...)."--Life and Letters, August 1928.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, nobolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon theirwriting--and I believe that they had a very great effect--that wasunimportant compared with the other difficulty which faced them (I wasstill considering those early nineteenth-century novelists) when theycame to set their thoughts on paper--that is that they had no traditionbehind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help. Forwe think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to goto the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them forpleasure. Lamb, Browne, Thackeray, Newman, Sterne, Dickens, DeQuincey--whoever it may be--never helped a woman yet, though she mayhave learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use. Theweight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own forher to lift anything substantial from him successfully. The ape is toodistant to be sedulous. Perhaps the first thing she would find, settingpen to paper, was that there was no common sentence ready for her use.All the great novelists like Thackeray and Dickens and Balzac havewritten a natural prose, swift but not slovenly, expressive but notprecious, taking their own tint without ceasing to be common property.They have based it on the sentence that was current at the time. Thesentence that was current at the beginning of the nineteenth century ransomething like this perhaps: "The grandeur of their works was anargument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could haveno higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their artand endless generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts toexertion; and habit facilitates success." That is a man's sentence;behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It was a sentencethat was unsuited for a woman's use. Charlotte Brontë, with all hersplendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon inher hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggardescription. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised aperfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and neverdeparted from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than CharlotteBrontë, she got infinitely more said. Indeed, since freedom and fullnessof expression are of the essence of the art, such a lack of tradition,such a scarcity and inadequacy of tools, must have told enormously uponthe writing of women. Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid endto end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades ordomes. And this shape too has been made by men out of their own needsfor their own uses. There is no reason to think that the form of theepic or of the poetic play suit a woman any more than the sentence suitsher. But all the older forms of literature were hardened and set by thetime she became a writer. The novel alone was young enough to be soft inher hands--another reason, perhaps, why she wrote novels. Yet who shallsay that even now "the novel" (I give it inverted commas to mark mysense of the words' inadequacy), who shall say that even this mostpliable of all forms is rightly shaped for her use? No doubt we shallfind her knocking that into shape for herself when she has the free useof 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 poetictragedy in five acts. Would she use verse?--would she not use proserather?

But these are difficult questions which lie in the twilight of thefuture. I must leave them, if only because they stimulate me to wanderfrom my subject into trackless forests where I shall be lost and, verylikely, devoured by wild beasts. I do not want, and I am sure that youdo not want me, to broach that very dismal subject, the future offiction, so that I will only pause here one moment to draw yourattention to the great part which must be played in that future so faras women are concerned by physical conditions. The book has somehow tobe adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women'sbooks should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, andframed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterruptedwork. For interruptions there will always be. Again, the nerves thatfeed the brain would seem to differ in men and women, and if you aregoing to make them work their best and hardest, you must find out whattreatment suits them--whether these hours of lectures, for instance,which the monks devised, presumably, hundreds of years ago, suitthem--what alternations of work and rest they need, interpreting restnot as doing nothing but as doing something but something that isdifferent; and what should that difference be? All this should bediscussed and discovered; all this is part of the question of women andfiction. And yet, I continued, approaching the bookcase again, whereshall 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 beallowed to practise medicine----

Happily my thoughts were now given another turn.

CHAPTER V

I had come at last, in the course of this rambling, to the shelves whichhold books by the living; by women and by men; for there are almost asmany books written by women now as by men. Or if that is not yet quitetrue, if the male is still the voluble sex, it is certainly true thatwomen no longer write novels solely. There are Jane Harrison's books onGreek archaeology; Vernon Lee's books on aesthetics; Gertrude Bell'sbooks on Persia. There are books on all sorts of subjects which ageneration ago no woman could have touched. There are poems and playsand criticism; there are histories and biographies, books of travel andbooks of scholarship and research; there are even a few philosophies andbooks about science and economics. And though novels predominate, novelsthemselves may very well have changed from association with books of adifferent feather. The natural simplicity, the epic age of women'swriting, may have gone. Reading and criticism may have given her a widerrange, a greater subtlety. The impulse towards autobiography may bespent. She may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method ofself-expression. Among these new novels one might find an answer toseveral such questions.

I took down one of them at random. It stood at the very end of theshelf, was called Life's Adventure, or some such title, by MaryCarmichael, and was published in this very month of October. It seems tobe her first book, I said to myself, but one must read it as if it werethe last volume in a fairly long series, continuing all those otherbooks that I have been glancing at--Lady Winchilsea's poems and AphraBehn's plays and the novels of the four great novelists. For bookscontinue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.And I must also consider her--this unknown woman--as the descendant ofall those other women whose circumstances I have been glancing at andsee what she inherits of their characteristics and restrictions. So,with a sigh, because novels so often provide an anodyne and not anantidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with aburning brand, I settled down with a notebook and a pencil to make whatI 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 thehang of her sentences first, I said, before I load my memory with blueeyes and brown and the relationship that there may be between Chloe andRoger. There will be time for that when I have decided whether she has apen 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 smoothgliding of sentence after sentence was interrupted. Something tore,something scratched; a single word here and there flashed its torch inmy eyes. She was "unhanding" herself as they say in the old plays. Sheis like a person striking a match that will not light, I thought. Butwhy, I asked her as if she were present, are Jane Austen's sentences notof the right shape for you? Must they all be scrapped because Emma andMr. Woodhouse are dead? Alas, I sighed, that it should be so. For whileJane Austen breaks from melody to melody as Mozart from song to song, toread this writing was like being out at sea in an open boat. Up onewent, down one sank. This terseness, this short-windedness, might meanthat she was afraid of something; afraid of being called "sentimental"perhaps; or she remembers that women's writing has been called floweryand so provides a superfluity of thorns; but until I have read a scenewith some care, I cannot be sure whether she is being herself or someoneelse. At any rate, she does not lower one's vitality, I thought, readingmore carefully. But she is heaping up too many facts. She will not beable to use half of them in a book of this size. (It was about half thelength of Jane Eyre.) However, by some means or other she succeeded ingetting us all--Roger, Chloe, Olivia, Tony and Mr. Bigham--in a canoe upthe river. Wait a moment, I said, leaning back in my chair, I mustconsider the whole thing more carefully before I go any further.

I am almost sure, I said to myself, that Mary Carmichael is playing atrick on us. For I feel as one feels on a switchback railway when thecar, instead of sinking, as one has been led to expect, swerves upagain. Mary is tampering with the expected sequence. First she broke thesentence; now she has broken the sequence. Very well, she has everyright to do both these things if she does them not for the sake ofbreaking, but for the sake of creating. Which of the two it is I cannotbe sure until she has faced herself with a situation. I will give herevery liberty, I said, to choose what that situation shall be; she shallmake it of tin cans and old kettles if she likes; but she must convinceme that she believes it to be a situation; and then when she has made itshe must face it. She must jump. And, determined to do my duty by her asreader if she would do her duty by me as writer, I turned the page andread... 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 ofSir Chartres 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--"Chloeliked Olivia..." Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacyof our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes womendo like women.

"Chloe liked Olivia," I read. And then it struck me how immense a changewas there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature.Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely Antony andCleopatra 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, conventionalised, if one dared say it,absurdly. Cleopatra's only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Isshe taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps,required no more. But how interesting it would have been if therelationship between the two women had been more complicated. All theserelationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendidgallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out,unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of myreading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attemptat it in Diana of the Crossways. They are confidantes, of course, inRacine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers anddaughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relationto men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fictionwere, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seenonly in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman'slife is that; and how little can a man know even of that when heobserves it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon hisnose. Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of women in fiction; theastonishing extremes of her beauty and horror; her alternations betweenheavenly goodness and hellish depravity--for so a lover would see her ashis love rose or sank, was prosperous or unhappy. This is not so true ofthe nineteenth-century novelists, of course. Woman becomes much morevarious and complicated there. Indeed it was the desire to write aboutwomen 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 thenovel as a more fitting receptacle. Even so it remains obvious, even inthe writing of Proust, that a man is terribly hampered and partial inhis knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men.

Also, I continued, looking down at the page again, it is becomingevident that women, like men, have other interests besides the perennialinterests of domesticity. "Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratorytogether...." I read on and discovered that these two young women wereengaged in mincing liver, which is, it seems, a cure for perniciousanæmia; although one of them was married and had--I think I am right instating--two small children. Now all that, of course, has had to be leftout, and thus the splendid portrait of the fictitious woman is much toosimple and much too monotonous. Suppose, for instance, that men wereonly represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were neverthe friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in theplays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature wouldsuffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal ofAntony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, noJaques--literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeedliterature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that havebeen shut upon women. Married against their will, kept in one room, andto one occupation, how could a dramatist give a full or interesting ortruthful account of them? Love was the only possible interpreter. Thepoet was forced to be passionate or bitter, unless indeed he chose to"hate women", which meant more often than not that he was unattractiveto them.

Now if Chloe likes Olivia and they share a laboratory, which of itselfwill make their friendship more varied and lasting because it will beless personal; if Mary Carmichael knows how to write, and I wasbeginning to enjoy some quality in her style; if she has a room toherself, of which I am not quite sure; if she has five hundred a year ofher own--but that remains to be proved--then I think that something ofgreat importance has happened.

For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express itshe will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.It is all half lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caveswhere one goes with a candle peering up and down, not knowing where oneis stepping. And I began to read the book again, and read how Chloewatched Olivia put a jar on a shelf and say how it was time to go hometo her children. That is a sight that has never been seen since theworld began, I exclaimed. And I watched too, very curiously. For Iwanted to see how Mary Carmichael set to work to catch those unrecordedgestures, those unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves, nomore palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women arealone, unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex. Shewill 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 obviousmotive behind it, so terribly accustomed to concealment and suppression,that they are off at the flicker of an eye turned observingly in theirdirection. The only way for you to do it, I thought, addressing MaryCarmichael 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 ina notebook, but in the shortest of shorthand, in words that are hardlysyllabled yet, what happens when Olivia--this organism that has beenunder the shadow of the rock these million years--feels the light fallon it, and sees coming her way a piece of strange food--knowledge,adventure, art. And she reaches out for it, I thought, again raising myeyes from the page, and has to devise some entirely new combination ofher resources, so highly developed for other purposes, so as to absorbthe new into the old without disturbing the infinitely intricate andelaborate balance of the whole.

But, alas, I had done what I had determined not to do; I had slippedunthinkingly into praise of my own sex. "Highly developed"--"infinitelyintricate"--such are undeniably terms of praise, and to praise one's ownsex is always suspect, often silly; moreover, in this case, how couldone justify it? One could not go to the map and say Columbus discoveredAmerica and Columbus was a woman; or take an apple and remark, Newtondiscovered the laws of gravitation and Newton was a woman; or look intothe sky and say aeroplanes are flying overhead and aeroplanes wereinvented by women. There is no mark on the wall to measure the preciseheight of women. There are no yard measures, neatly divided into thefractions of an inch, that one can lay against the qualities of a goodmother or the devotion of a daughter, or the fidelity of a sister, orthe capacity of a housekeeper. Few women even now have been graded atthe universities; the great trials of the professions, army and navy,trade, politics and diplomacy have hardly tested them. They remain evenat this moment almost unclassified. But if I want to know all that ahuman being can tell me about Sir Hawley Butts, for instance, I haveonly to open Burke or Debrett and I shall find that he took such andsuch a degree; owns a hall; has an heir; was Secretary to a Board;represented Great Britain in Canada; and has received a certain numberof degrees, offices, medals and other distinctions by which his meritsare stamped upon him indelibly. Only Providence can know more about SirHawley Butts than that.

When, therefore, I say "highly developed", "infinitely intricate" ofwomen, I am unable to verify my words either in Whitaker, Debrett or theUniversity Calendar. In this predicament what can I do? And I looked atthe bookcase again. There were the biographies: Johnson and Goethe andCarlyle and Sterne and Cowper and Shelley and Voltaire and Browning andmany others. And I began thinking of all those great men who have forone reason or another admired, sought out, lived with, confided in, madelove to, written of, trusted in, and shown what can only be described assome need of and dependence upon certain persons of the opposite sex.That all these relationships were absolutely Platonic I would notaffirm, and Sir William Joynson Hicks would probably deny. But we shouldwrong these illustrious men very greatly if we insisted that they gotnothing from these alliances but comfort, flattery and the pleasures ofthe body. What they got, it is obvious, was something that their own sexwas unable to supply; and it would not be rash, perhaps, to define itfurther, without quoting the doubtless rhapsodical words of the poets,as some stimulus, some renewal of creative power which is in the giftonly of the opposite sex to bestow. He would open the door ofdrawing-room or nursery, I thought, and find her among her childrenperhaps, or with a piece of embroidery on her knee--at any rate, thecentre of some different order and system of life, and the contrastbetween this world and his own, which might be the law courts or theHouse of Commons, would at once refresh and invigorate; and there wouldfollow, even in the simplest talk, such a natural difference of opinionthat the dried ideas in him would be fertilised anew; and the sight ofher creating in a different medium from his own would so quicken hiscreative power that insensibly his sterile mind would begin to plotagain, and he would find the phrase or the scene which was lacking whenhe put on his hat to visit her. Every Johnson has his Thrale, and holdsfast to her for some such reasons as these, and when the Thrale marriesher Italian music master Johnson goes half mad with rage and disgust,not merely that he will miss his pleasant evenings at Streatham, butthat the light of his life will be "as if gone out".

And without being Dr. Johnson or Goethe or Carlyle or Voltaire, one mayfeel, though very differently from these great men, the nature of thisintricacy and the power of this highly developed creative faculty amongwomen. One goes into the room--but the resources of the English languagewould be much put to the stretch, and whole flights of words would needto wing their way illegitimately into existence before a woman could saywhat 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 andsilks; are hard as horsehair or soft as feathers--one has only to gointo any room in any street for the whole of that extremely complexforce 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 thistime the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has,indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it mustneeds harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. Butthis creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men. Andone must conclude that it would be a thousand pities if it were hinderedor 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 ifwomen wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if twosexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of theworld, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bringout and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For wehave too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back andbring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees atother skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity; and weshould have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching ProfessorX rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself "superior".

Mary Carmichael, I thought, still hovering at a little distance abovethe page, will have her work cut out for her merely as an observer. I amafraid indeed that she will be tempted to become, what I think the lessinteresting branch of the species--the naturalist-novelist, and not thecontemplative. There are so many new facts for her to observe. She willnot need to limit herself any longer to the respectable houses of theupper middle classes. She will go without kindness or condescension, butin the spirit of fellowship, into those small, scented rooms where sitthe courtesan, the harlot and the lady with the pug dog. There theystill sit in the rough and ready-made clothes that the male writer hashad perforce to clap upon their shoulders. But Mary Carmichael will haveout her scissors and fit them close to every hollow and angle. It willbe a curious sight, when it comes, to see these women as they are, butwe must wait a little, for Mary Carmichael will still be encumbered withthat self-consciousness in the presence of "sin" which is the legacy ofour sexual barbarity. She will still wear the shoddy old fetters ofclass on her feet.

However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nordo they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summerafternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to my mind's eye oneof those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rowsare innumerably populated. With the eye of the imagination I saw a veryancient lady crossing the street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, herdaughter, perhaps, both so respectably booted and furred that theirdressing in the afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselvesput away in cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout thesummer months. They cross the road when the lamps are being lit (for thedusk 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 hasmeant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for thebattle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for thebirth of King Edward the Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pindown the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on thefifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would lookvague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the dinners arecooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and goneout into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. Nobiography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, withoutmeaning 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 inthought through the streets of London feeling in imagination thepressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether fromthe women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the ringsembedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation likethe swing of Shakespeare's words; or from the violet-sellers andmatch-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from driftinggirls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of menand women and the flickering lights of shop windows. All that you willhave to explore, I said to Mary Carmichael, holding your torch firm inyour hand. Above all, you must illumine your own soul with itsprofundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities,and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what isyour relation to the ever-changing and turning world of gloves and shoesand stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come throughchemists' bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor ofpseudo-marble. For in imagination I had gone into a shop; it was laidwith black and white paving; it was hung, astonishingly beautifully,with coloured ribbons. Mary Carmichael might well have a look at that inpassing, I thought, for it is a sight that would lend itself to the penas fittingly as any snowy peak or rocky gorge in the Andes. And there isthe girl behind the counter too--I would as soon have her true historyas the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or seventieth study ofKeats and his use of Miltonic inversion which old Professor Z and hislike are now inditing. And then I went on very warily, on the very tipsof my toes (so cowardly am I, so afraid of the lash that was once almostlaid on my own shoulders), to murmur that she should also learn tolaugh, without bitterness, at the vanities--say rather at thepeculiarities, for it is a less offensive word--of the other sex. Forthere is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which onecan never see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex candischarge for sex--to describe that spot the size of a shilling at theback of the head. Think how much women have profited by the comments ofJuvenal; by the criticism of Strindberg. Think with what humanity andbrilliancy men, from the earliest ages, have pointed out to women thatdark place at the back of the head! And if Mary were very brave and veryhonest, she would go behind the other sex and tell us what she foundthere. A true picture of man as a whole can never be painted until awoman has described that spot the size of a shilling. Mr. Woodhouse andMr. Casuabon are spots of that size and nature. Not of course thatanyone in their senses would counsel her to hold up to scorn andridicule of set purpose--literature shows the futility of what iswritten in that spirit. Be truthful, one would say, and the result isbound to be amazingly interesting. Comedy is bound to be enriched. Newfacts are bound to be discovered.

However, it was high time to lower my eyes to the page again. It wouldbe better, instead of speculating what Mary Carmichael might write andshould write, to see what in fact Mary Carmichael did write. So I beganto 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 ofpluming myself upon my impeccable taste, my fastidious ear. For it wasuseless to say, "Yes, yes, this is very nice; but Jane Austen wrote muchbetter than you do", when I had to admit that there was no point oflikeness between them. Then she had gone further and broken thesequence--the expected order. Perhaps she had done this unconsciously,merely giving things their natural order, as a woman would, if she wrotelike a woman. But the effect was somehow baffling; one could not see awave heaping itself, a crisis coming round the next corner. Therefore Icould not plume myself either upon the depths of my feelings and myprofound knowledge of the human heart. For whenever I was about to feelthe usual things in the usual places, about love, about death, theannoying creature twitched me away, as if the important point were justa little further on. And thus she made it impossible for me to roll outmy sonorous phrases about "elemental feelings", the "common stuff ofhumanity", "the depths of the human heart", and all those other phraseswhich support us in our belief that, however clever we may be on top, weare very serious, very profound and very humane underneath. She made mefeel, on the contrary, that instead of being serious and profound andhumane, one might be--and the thought was far less seductive--merelylazy minded and conventional into the bargain.

But I read on, and noted certain other facts. She was no "genius"--thatwas evident. She had nothing like the love of Nature, the fieryimagination, the wild poetry, the brilliant wit, the brooding wisdom ofher great predecessors, Lady Winchilsea, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë,Jane Austen and George Eliot; she could not write with the melody andthe dignity of Dorothy Osborne--indeed she was no more than a clevergirl whose books will no doubt be pulped by the publishers in ten years'time. But, nevertheless, she had certain advantages which women of fargreater gift lacked even half a century ago. Men were no longer to her"the opposing faction"; she need not waste her time railing againstthem; she need not climb on to the roof and ruin her peace of mindlonging for travel, experience and a knowledge of the world andcharacter that were denied her. Fear and hatred were almost gone, ortraces of them showed only in a slight exaggeration of the joy offreedom, a tendency to the caustic and satirical, rather than to theromantic, in her treatment of the other sex. Then there could be nodoubt that as a novelist she enjoyed some natural advantages of a highorder. She had a sensibility that was very wide, eager and free. Itresponded to an almost imperceptible touch on it. It feasted like aplant newly stood in the air on every sight and sound that came its way.It ranged, too, very subtly and curiously, among almost unknown orunrecorded things; it lighted on small things and showed that perhapsthey were not small after all. It brought buried things to light andmade one wonder what need there had been to bury them. Awkward thoughshe was and without the unconscious bearing of long descent which makesthe least turn of the pen of a Thackeray or a Lamb delightful to theear, she had--I began to think--mastered the first great lesson; shewrote 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 comesonly when sex is unconscious of itself.

All this was to the good. But no abundance of sensation or fineness ofperception would avail unless she could build up out of the fleeting andthe personal the lasting edifice which remains unthrown. I had said thatI would wait until she faced herself with "a situation". And I meant bythat until she proved by summoning, beckoning and getting together thatshe was not a skimmer of surfaces merely, but had looked beneath intothe depths. Now is the time, she would say to herself at a certainmoment, when without doing anything violent I can show the meaning ofall this. And she would begin--how unmistakable that quickeningis!--beckoning and summoning, and there would rise up in memory, halfforgotten, perhaps quite trivial things in other chapters dropped by theway. And she would make their presence felt while someone sewed orsmoked a pipe as naturally as possible, and one would feel, as she wenton writing, as if one had gone to the top of the world and seen it laidout, very majestically, beneath.

At any rate, she was making the attempt. And as I watched herlengthening out for the test, I saw, but hoped that she did not see, thebishops and the deans, the doctors and the professors, the patriarchsand the pedagogues all at her shouting warning and advice. You can't dothis and you shan't do that! Fellows and scholars only allowed on thegrass! Ladies not admitted without a letter of introduction! Aspiringand graceful female novelists this way! So they kept at her like thecrowd at a fence on the race-course, and it was her trial to take herfence without looking to right or to left. If you stop to curse you arelost, I said to her; equally, if you stop to laugh. Hesitate or fumbleand you are done for. Think only of the jump, I implored her, as if Ihad put the whole of my money on her back; and she went over it like abird. But there was fence beyond that and a fence beyond that. Whethershe had the staying power I was doubtful, for the clapping and thecrying were fraying to the nerves. But she did her best. Consideringthat Mary Carmichael was no genius, but an unknown girl writing herfirst novel in a bed-sitting-room, without enough of those desirablethings, time, money and idleness, she did not do so badly, I thought.

Give her another hundred years, I concluded, reading the lastchapter--people's noses and bare shoulders showed naked against a starrysky, for someone had twitched the curtain in the drawing-room--give hera room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind andleave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better bookone of these days. She will be a poet, I said, putting Life'sAdventure, by Mary Carmichael, at the end of the shelf, in anotherhundred years' time.

CHAPTER VI

Next day the light of the October morning was falling in dusty shaftsthrough the uncurtained windows, and the hum of traffic rose from thestreet. London then was winding itself up again; the factory was astir;the machines were beginning. It was tempting, after all this reading, tolook out of the window and see what London was doing on the morning ofthe 26th of October 1928. And what was London doing? Nobody, it seemed,was reading Antony and Cleopatra. London was wholly indifferent, itappeared, to Shakespeare's plays. Nobody cared a straw--and I do notblame them--for the future of fiction, the death of poetry or thedevelopment by the average woman of a prose style completely expressiveof her mind. If opinions upon any of these matters had been chalked onthe pavement, nobody would have stooped to read them. The nonchalance ofthe hurrying feet would have rubbed them out in half an hour. Here camean errand-boy; here a woman with a dog on a lead. The fascination of theLondon street is that no two people are ever alike; each seems bound onsome private affair of his own. There were the business-like, with theirlittle 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 thepassing of their own bodies, lifted their hats. And then a verydistinguished gentleman came slowly down a doorstep and paused to avoidcollision with a bustling lady who had, by some means or other, acquireda splendid fur coat and a bunch of Parma violets. They all seemedseparate, self-absorbed, on business of their own.

At this moment, as so often happens in London, there was a complete lulland suspension of traffic. Nothing came down the street; nobody passed.A single leaf detached itself from the plane tree at the end of thestreet, and in that pause and suspension fell. Somehow it was like asignal falling, a signal pointing to a force in things which one hadoverlooked. It seemed to point to a river, which flowed past, invisibly,round the corner, down the street, and took people and eddied themalong, as the stream at Oxbridge had taken the undergraduate in his boatand the dead leaves. Now it was bringing from one side of the street tothe other diagonally a girl in patent leather boots, and then a youngman in a maroon overcoat; it was also bringing a taxi-cab; and itbrought all three together at a point directly beneath my window; wherethe taxi stopped; and the girl and the young man stopped; and they gotinto the taxi; and then the cab glided off as if it were swept on by thecurrent elsewhere.

The sight was ordinary enough; what was strange was the rhythmical orderwith which my imagination had invested it; and the fact that theordinary sight of two people getting into a cab had the power tocommunicate something of their own seeming satisfaction. The sight oftwo people coming down the street and meeting at the corner seems toease the mind of some strain, I thought, watching the taxi turn and makeoff. Perhaps to think, as I had been thinking these two days, of one sexas distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity ofthe mind. Now that effort had ceased and that unity had been restored byseeing two people come together and get into a taxi-cab. The mind iscertainly a very mysterious organ, I reflected, drawing my head in fromthe window, about which nothing whatever is known, though we depend uponit so completely. Why do I feel that there are severances andoppositions in the mind, as there are strains from obvious causes on thebody? What does one mean by "the unity of the mind"? I pondered, forclearly the mind has so great a power of concentrating at any point atany moment that it seems to have no single state of being. It canseparate itself from the people in the street, for example, and think ofitself as apart from them, at an upper window looking down on them. Orit can think with other people spontaneously, as, for instance, in acrowd waiting to hear some piece of news read out. It can think backthrough its fathers or through its mothers, as I have said that a womanwriting thinks back through her mothers. Again if one is a woman one isoften surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say inwalking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of thatcivilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien andcritical. Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringingthe world into different perspectives. But some of these states of mindseem, even if adopted spontaneously, to be less comfortable than others.In order to keep oneself continuing in them one is unconsciously holdingsomething back, and gradually the repression becomes an effort. Butthere may be some state of mind in which one could continue withouteffort because nothing is required to be held back. And this perhaps, Ithought, coming in from the window, is one of them. For certainly when Isaw the couple get into the taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after beingdivided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obviousreason would be that it is natural for the sexes to co-operate. One hasa profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that theunion of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the mostcomplete happiness. But the sight of the two people getting into thetaxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there aretwo sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, andwhether they also require to be united in order to get completesatisfaction and happiness? And I went on amateurishly to sketch a planof the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, onefemale; and in the man's brain the man predominates over the woman, andin the woman's brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal andcomfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmonytogether, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the womanpart of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must haveintercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when hesaid that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takesplace that the mind is fully fertilised and uses all its faculties.Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than amind that is purely feminine, I thought. But it would be well to testwhat one meant by man-womanly, and conversely by woman-manly, by pausingand looking at a book or two.

Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind isandrogynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women;a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to theirinterpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make thesedistinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that theandrogynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotionwithout impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent andundivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare's mind as the type ofthe androgynous, of the man-womanly mind, though it would be impossibleto say what Shakespeare thought of women. And if it be true that it isone of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not thinkspecially or separately of sex, how much harder it is to attain thatcondition now than ever before. Here I came to the books by livingwriters, and there paused and wondered if this fact were not at the rootof something that had long puzzled me. No age can ever have been asstridently sex-conscious as our own; those innumerable books by menabout women in the British Museum are a proof of it. The Suffragecampaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men anextraordinary desire for self-assertion; it must have made them lay anemphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics which they would nothave troubled to think about had they not been challenged. And when oneis challenged, even by a few women in black bonnets, one retaliates, ifone has never been challenged before, rather excessively. That perhapsaccounts for some of the characteristics that I remember to have foundhere, I thought, taking down a new novel by Mr. A, who is in the primeof life and very well thought of, apparently, by the reviewers. I openedit. Indeed, it was delightful to read a man's writing again. It was sodirect, so straightforward after the writing of women. It indicated suchfreedom of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in himself. Onehad a sense of physical well-being in the presence of thiswell-nourished, well-educated, free mind, which had never been thwartedor opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself inwhatever way it liked. All this was admirable. But after reading achapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straightdark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter "I". One begandodging 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 andlogical; as hard as a nut, and polished for centuries by good teachingand good feeding. I respect and admire that "I" from the bottom of myheart. But--here I turned a page or two, looking for something orother--the worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter "I" all isshapeless as mist. Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. But... she has nota 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 onceobliterated Phoebe. For Alan had views and Phoebe was quenched in theflood of his views. And then Alan, I thought, has passions; and here Iturned page after page very fast, feeling that the crisis wasapproaching, and so it was. It took place on the beach under the sun. Itwas done very openly. It was done very vigorously. Nothing could havebeen more indecent. But... I had said "but" too often. One cannot go onsaying "but". One must finish the sentence somehow, I rebuked myself.Shall I finish it, "But--I am bored!" But why was I bored? Partlybecause of the dominance of the letter "I" and the aridity, which, likethe giant beech tree, it casts within its shade. Nothing will growthere. And partly for some more obscure reason. There seemed to be someobstacle, some impediment in Mr. A's mind which blocked the fountain ofcreative energy and shored it within narrow limits. And remembering thelunch party at Oxbridge, and the cigarette ash and the Manx cat andTennyson and Christina Rossetti all in a bunch, it seemed possible thatthe impediment lay there. As he no longer hums under his breath, "Therehas fallen a splendid tear from the passion-flower at the gate", whenPhoebe crosses the beach, and she no longer replies, "My heart is like asinging bird whose nest is in a water'd shoot", when Alan approacheswhat can he do? Being honest as the day and logical as the sun, there isonly one thing he can do. And that he does, to do him justice, over andover (I said turning the pages) and over again. And that, I added, awareof the awful nature of the confession, seems somehow dull. Shakespeare'sindecency uproots a thousand other things in one's mind, and is far frombeing dull. But Shakespeare does it for pleasure; Mr. A, as the nursessay, does it on purpose. He does it in protest. He is protesting againstthe equality of the other sex by asserting his own superiority. He istherefore impeded and inhibited and self-conscious as Shakespeare mighthave been if he too had known Miss Clough and Miss Davies. DoubtlessElizabethan literature would have been very different from what it is ifthe woman's movement had begun in the sixteenth century and not in thenineteenth.

What, then, it amounts to, if this theory of the two sides of the mindholds good, is that virility has now become self-conscious--men, that isto say, are now writing only with the male side of their brains. It is amistake for a woman to read them, for she will inevitably look forsomething that she will not find. It is the power of suggestion that onemost 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 wasthat his feelings no longer communicated; his mind seemed separated intodifferent 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 theground--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 theonly sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret ofperpetual life.

But whatever the reason may be, it is a fact that one must deplore. Forit 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 writersfall upon deaf ears. Do what she will a woman cannot find in them thatfountain of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It isnot only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values anddescribe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these booksare permeated is to a woman incomprehensible. It is coming, it isgathering, it is about to burst on one's head, one begins saying longbefore the end. That picture will fall on old Jolyon's head; he will dieof the shock; the old clerk will speak over him two or three obituarywords; and all the swans on the Thames will simultaneously burst outsinging. But one will rush away before that happens and hide in thegooseberry bushes, for the emotion which is so deep, so subtle, sosymbolical to a man moves a woman to wonder. So with Mr. Kipling'sofficers who turn their backs; and his Sowers who sow the Seed; and hisMen who are alone with their Work; and the Flag--one blushes at allthese capital letters as if one had been caught eavesdropping at somepurely masculine orgy. The fact is that neither Mr. Galsworthy nor Mr.Kipling has a spark of the woman in him. Thus all their qualities seemto a woman, if one may generalise, crude and immature. They lacksuggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hardit hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

And in that restless mood in which one takes books out and puts themback again without looking at them I began to envisage an age to come ofpure, of self-assertive virility, such as the letters of professors(take Sir Walter Raleigh's letters, for instance) seem to forebode, andthe rulers of Italy have already brought into being. For one can hardlyfail to be impressed in Rome by the sense of unmitigated masculinity;and whatever the value of unmitigated masculinity upon the state, onemay question the effect of it upon the art of poetry. At any rate,according to the newspapers, there is a certain anxiety about fiction inItaly. There has been a meeting of academicians whose object it is "todevelop the Italian novel". "Men famous by birth, or in finance,industry or the Fascist corporations" came together the other day anddiscussed the matter, and a telegram was sent to the Duce expressing thehope "that the Fascist era would soon give birth to a poet worthy ofit". We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whetherpoetry can come out of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother aswell as a father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horridlittle abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of somecounty town. Such monsters never live long, it is said; one has neverseen a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two heads on onebody do not make for length of life.

However, the blame for all this, if one is anxious to lay blame, restsno more upon one sex than upon the other. All seducers and reformers areresponsible: Lady Bessborough when she lied to Lord Granville; MissDavies when she told the truth to Mr. Greg. All who have brought about astate 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 happyage, before Miss Davies and Miss Clough were born, when the writer usedboth sides of his mind equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then,for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowperand Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and BenJonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth andTolstoi. In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps alittle too much of a woman. But that failing is too rare for one tocomplain of it, since without some mixture of the kind the intellectseems to predominate and the other faculties of the mind harden andbecome barren. However, I consoled myself with the reflection that thisis perhaps a passing phase; much of what I have said in obedience to mypromise 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 yetcome 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 Womenand Fiction, is that it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of theirsex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must bewoman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the leaststress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in anyway to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech;for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. Itceases to be fertilised. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly,as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; itcannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take placein the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation canbe accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. Thewhole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that thewriter is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There mustbe freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a lightglimmer. The curtains must be close drawn. The writer, I thought, oncehis experience is over, must lie back and let his mind celebrate itsnuptials 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 floatcalmly down the river. And I saw again the current which took the boatand the undergraduate and the dead leaves; and the taxi took the man andthe woman, I thought, seeing them come together across the street, andthe current swept them away, I thought, hearing far off the roar ofLondon's traffic, into that tremendous stream.

* * * * *

Here, then, Mary Beton ceases to speak. She has told you how she reachedthe conclusion--the prosaic conclusion--that it is necessary to havefive hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are towrite fiction or poetry. She has tried to lay bare the thoughts andimpressions that led her to think this. She has asked you to follow herflying into the arms of a Beadle, lunching here, dining there, drawingpictures in the British Museum, taking books from the shelf, looking outof the window. While she has been doing all these things, you no doubthave been observing her failings and foibles and deciding what effectthey have had on her opinions. You have been contradicting her andmaking whatever additions and deductions seem good to you. That is allas it should be, for in a question like this truth is only to be had bylaying together many varieties of error. And I will end now in my ownperson by anticipating two criticisms, so obvious that you can hardlyfail to make them.

No opinion has been expressed, you may say, upon the comparative meritsof the sexes even as writers. That was done purposely, because, even ifthe time had come for such a valuation--and it is far more important atthe moment to know how much money women had and how many rooms than totheorise about their capacities--even if the time had come I do notbelieve that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed likesugar and butter, not even in Cambridge, where they are so adept atputting people into classes and fixing caps on their heads and lettersafter their names. I do not believe that even the Table of Precedencywhich you will find in Whitaker's Almanac represents a final order ofvalues, or that there is any sound reason to suppose that a Commander ofthe Bath will ultimately walk into dinner behind a Master in Lunacy. Allthis pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all thisclaiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to theprivate-school stage of human existence where there are "sides", and itis necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmostimportance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of theHeadmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they ceaseto believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots. Atany rate, where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fixlabels of merit in such a way that they do not come off. Are not reviewsof current literature a perpetual illustration of the difficulty ofjudgement? "This great book", "this worthless book", the same book iscalled by both names. Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No,delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile ofall occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the mostservile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, thatis 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, ashade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver potin his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, isthe most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastitywhich used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mereflea-bite in comparison.

Next I think that you may object that in all this I have made too muchof the importance of material things. Even allowing a generous marginfor symbolism, that five hundred a year stands for the power tocontemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to think foroneself, 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 youthe words of your own Professor of Literature, who knows better than Ido what goes to the making of a poet. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couchwrites:[12]

"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. Ofthese, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men; and ofthese three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the onlyone not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it isa sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory thatpoetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich,holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelvewere University men: which means that somehow or other they procured themeans to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hardfact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, andI challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no morehave attained to write Saul or The Ring and the Book than Ruskinwould have attained to writing Modern Painters if his father had notdealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income;and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slewyoung, as she slew John Clare in a mad-house, and James Thomson by thelaudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, butlet us face them. It is--however dishonouring to us as a nation--certainthat, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in thesedays, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance. Believe me--andI have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundredand twenty elementary schools,--we may prate of democracy, but actually,a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of anAthenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of whichgreat writings are born."

[Footnote 12]The Art of Writing, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

Nobody could put the point more plainly. "The poor poet has not in thesedays, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance... a poor childin England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave tobe emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writingsare born." That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon materialthings. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have alwaysbeen poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning oftime. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenianslaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. Thatis 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 whomI wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough to two wars, the Crimeanwhich let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the EuropeanWar 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 behere to-night, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year,precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in theextreme.

Still, you may object, why do you attach so much importance to thiswriting of books by women when, according to you, it requires so mucheffort, leads perhaps to the murder of one's aunts, will make one almostcertainly late for luncheon, and may bring one into very grave disputeswith certain very good fellows? My motives, let me admit, are partlyselfish. Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I likereading books in the bulk. Lately my diet has become a triflemonotonous; history is too much about wars; biography too much aboutgreat men; poetry has shown, I think, a tendency to sterility, andfiction--but I have sufficiently exposed my disabilities as a critic ofmodern fiction and will say no more about it. Therefore I would ask youto write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial orhowever vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possessyourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate thefuture or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter atstreet corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. ForI am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me--andthere are thousands like me--you would write books of travel andadventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, andcriticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainlyprofit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing eachother. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl withpoetry and philosophy. Moreover, if you consider any great figure of thepast, like Sappho, like the Lady Murasaki, like Emily Brontë, you willfind that she is an inheritor as well as an originator, and has comeinto existence because women have come to have the habit of writingnaturally; so that even as a prelude to poetry such activity on yourpart would be invaluable.

But when I look back through these notes and criticise my own train ofthought as I made them, I find that my motives were not altogetherselfish. There runs through these comments and discursions theconviction--or is it the instinct?--that good books are desirable andthat 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 Iam urging you to do what will be for your good and for the good of theworld 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, areapt to play one false. What is meant by "reality"? It would seem to besomething very erratic, very undependable--now to be found in a dustyroad, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in thesun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. Itoverwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent worldmore real than the world of speech--and then there it is again in anomnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwellin shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. Butwhatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remainsover when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is whatis left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as Ithink, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence ofthis reality. It is his business to find it and collect it andcommunicate it to the rest of us. So at least I infer from readingLear or Emma or La Recherche du Temps Perdu. For the reading ofthese books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses;one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of itscovering and given an intenser life. Those are the enviable people wholive at enmity with unreality; and those are the pitiable who areknocked on the head by the thing done without knowing or caring. So thatwhen I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am askingyou to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it wouldappear, whether one can impart it or not.

Here I would stop, but the pressure of convention decrees that everyspeech must end with a peroration. And a peroration addressed to womenshould have something, you will agree, particularly exalting andennobling about it. I should implore you to remember yourresponsibilities, to be higher, more spiritual; I should remind you howmuch depends upon you, and what an influence you can exert upon thefuture. But those exhortations can safely, I think, be left to the othersex, who will put them, and indeed have put them, with far greatereloquence than I can compass. When I rummage in my own mind I find nonoble sentiments about being companions and equals and influencing theworld to higher ends. I find myself saying briefly and prosaically thatit is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dreamof influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it soundexalted. Think of things in themselves.

And again I am reminded by dipping into newspapers and novels andbiographies that when a woman speaks to women she should have somethingvery unpleasant up her sleeve. Women are hard on women. Women dislikewomen. Women--but are you not sick to death of the word? I can assureyou that I am. Let us agree, then, that a paper read by a woman to womenshould end with something particularly disagreeable.

But how does it go? What can I think of? The truth is, I often likewomen. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I liketheir anonymity. I like--but I must not run on in this way. Thatcupboard there,--you say it holds clean table-napkins only; but what ifSir Archibald Bodkin were concealed among them? Let me then adopt asterner tone. Have I, in the preceding words, conveyed to yousufficiently the warnings and reprobation of mankind? I have told youthe very low opinion in which you were held by Mr. Oscar Browning. Ihave indicated what Napoleon once thought of you and what Mussolinithinks now. Then, in case any of you aspire to fiction, I have copiedout for your benefit the advice of the critic about courageouslyacknowledging the limitations of your sex. I have referred to ProfessorX and given prominence to his statement that women are intellectually,morally and physically inferior to men. I have handed on all that hascome my way without going in search of it, and here is a finalwarning--from Mr. John Langdon Davies.[13]Mr. John Langdon Davies warnswomen "that when children cease to be altogether desirable, women ceaseto be altogether necessary". I hope you will make a note of it.

[Footnote 13]A Short History of Women, by John Langdon Davies.

How can I further encourage you to go about the business of life? Youngwomen, I would say, and please attend, for the peroration is beginning,you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made adiscovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire orled an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, andyou have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings ofcivilisation. What is your excuse? It is all very well for you to say,pointing to the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarmingwith black and white and coffee-coloured inhabitants, all busily engagedin traffic and enterprise and love-making, we have had other work on ourhands. Without our doing, those seas would be unsailed and those fertilelands a desert. We have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps tothe age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred andtwenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, atpresent 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 timemay I remind you that there have been at least two colleges for women inexistence in England since the year 1866; that after the year 1880 amarried woman was allowed by law to possess her own property; and thatin 1919--which is a whole nine years ago--she was given a vote? May Ialso remind you that the most of the professions have been open to youfor close on ten years now? When you reflect upon these immenseprivileges and the length of time during which they have been enjoyed,and the fact that there must be at this moment some two thousand womencapable of earning over five hundred a year in one way or another, youwill agree that the excuse of lack of opportunity, training,encouragement, leisure and money no longer holds good. Moreover, theeconomists are telling us that Mrs. Seton has had too many children. Youmust, of course, go on bearing children, but, so they say, in twos andthrees, not in tens and twelves.

Thus, with some time on your hands and with some book learning in yourbrains--you have had enough of the other kind, and are sent to collegepartly, I suspect, to be un-educated--surely you should embark uponanother stage of your very long, very laborious and highly obscurecareer. A thousand pens are ready to suggest what you should do and whateffect 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 diedyoung--alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibusesnow stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that thispoet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads stilllives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are nothere to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting thechildren to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they arecontinuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us inthe flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within yourpower to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century orso--I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not ofthe little separate lives which we live as individuals--and have fivehundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit offreedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape alittle from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always intheir 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 pastMilton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we facethe fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but thatwe go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and notonly to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come andthe dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body whichshe has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of theunknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, shewill be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without thateffort on our part, without that determination that when she is bornagain she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that wecannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that shewould come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in povertyand obscurity, is worth while.

THE END

[End of A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf]