5 Virginia Woolf Quotes on Literature

Virginia Woolf quotes on literature

2. But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.

18. Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

22. I would venture to guess than Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

24. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

41. But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence - of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.