“ The only way for you to do it … would be to talk of something else, looking steadily out of the window, and this note, not with a pencil in a notebook, but in the shortest of shorthand, in words that are hardly syllabled yet, what happens when Olivia—this organism that has been under the shadow of the rock these million years—feels the light fall on it, and see coming her way a piece of strange food—knowledge, adventure, art. And she reaches out for it, I thought … and has to devise some entirely new combination of resources, so highly developed for other purposes, so as to absorb the new into the old without disturbing the intricate and elaborate balance of the whole.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, page 84. Shifting and enlarging the magisterium of writing to include women’s consciousness is the subject of Woolf’s great essay. It has been a work of many generations, from Jane Austen and the Brontës to Margaret Fuller and Emily Dickinson to (the massively underappreciated) Sarah Orne Jewett, through Woolf herself and on to Maxine Kumin, Elizabeth Bishop, Jeanette Winterson, and countless others—my list is far too short, and the work far from finished. But here Woolf charts how the seismic shifts of writing’s place and purpose in human life not only operate on historical and geological time scales, but also occur at the most intimate measures of individual observation and notation.
