Virginia Woolf described her childhood at 22 Hyde Park Gate: ‘Ourduties were very plain and our pleasures absolutely appropriate.’ Life wasdivided into two spaces – indoors, in a nursery and a book-lined drawingroom, and outdoors, in Kensington Gardens. ‘There were smells and flowersand dead leaves and chestnuts, by which you distinguished the seasons, andeach had innumerable associations, and power to flood the brain in a second.’

Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelistis doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment withthe dangers and difficulties of words.

The only advice, indeed,that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, tofollow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your ownconclusions

Let us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible hand-writing. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink. —“Hours in a Library”

Creativity and productivity do indeed require a room of one’s own.

Let us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible handwriting….here we have copied out fine passages from the classics;…here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink. ~ Virginia Woolf, “Hours in a Library”

Woolf achieves two things: she argues that illness has been unfairly dismissed as unworthy of representation in literature, and, before she has even made this argument, she has already proved it by showing the vast range of experiences that illness comprises, the way sickness makes even an otherwise mundane experience seem tinged with Bardic drama, or the rainy-night fire of noir; illness, in other words, contains the grand battles and unmapped tundras and emotions bright-dark as Picasso’s harlequins present in so many books labeled “important,” yet it rarely appears as a main theme.

“Considering how common illness is,” Woolf writes, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth”

A Room of One’s Own White Colleagues

The wonderful, poisonous story of Botulism. The killer story

her"/Jism, defined as"botulism.

new discursive resources for onvu,J women writer

the payment that he re-ceives from the community or from individuals;

Strolling around the campus, she is warned off the grass by an offi-cious beadle and barred entry to the library because she is a woman.

an imagery of killing

INTERVIEWER On the subject of being a woman writer in a man’s world, you’ve mentioned A Room of One’s Own as a touchstone. LE GUIN My mother gave it to me. It is an important book for a mother to give a daughter. She gave me A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas when I was a teenager. So she corrupted me thoroughly, bless her heart. Though you know, in the 1950s, A Room of One’s Own was kind of tough going. Writing was something that men set the rules for, and I had never questioned that. The women who questioned those rules were too revolutionary for me even to know about them. So I fit myself into the man’s world of writing and wrote like a man, presenting only the male point of view. My early books are all set in a man’s world.