And since a novel has this correspondence to real life$$$ its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely$$$ football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion$$$ the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book$$$ the critic assumes$$$ because it deals with war.

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power$$$ however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common$$$ of thinking by the body of the people$$$ so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Fiction is like a spider's web$$$ attached ever so lightly perhaps$$$ but still attached to life at all four corners.

I should need to be a herd of elephants$$$ I thought$$$ and a wilderness of spiders$$$ desperately referring to the animals that are reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed$$$ to cope with all of this.

However$$$ the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to my mind’s eye one of those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated.

When$$$ however$$$ one reads of a witch being ducked$$$ of a woman possessed by devils$$$ of a wise woman selling herbs$$$ or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother$$$ then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist$$$ a suppressed poet$$$ of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen$$$ some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed$$$ I would venture to guess that Anon$$$ who wrote so many poems without signing them$$$ was often a woman.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

So long as you write what you wish to write$$$ that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours$$$ nobody can say.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.