For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Talented women of the past were likely driven to ruin by societal rejection and internal conflict.
- In plain terms
- A gifted girl writing poetry would be stopped by others and her own doubts, harming her health.
- What can you take from it?
- Society often destroys women's creative potential.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- How does society treat talent?
- What stops creativity in women?
Another view
Some women may have persisted despite these odds.
More from Virginia Woolf
I would venture to guess than Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
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Permalink to quote #24 Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible;…
Permalink to quote #21
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