There aren't really words for me to express the admiration I have for Virginia Woolf. This, being the book the cemented her place in my esteem, was read in the winter of 1999. I'll let a few underlined passages from my beloved copy be their own review here:"I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me."
"Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction."
"A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history."
"Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband."
"and.....the five dots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment."
"Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind...She will be a poet."
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