A Room of One's Own, and Three Guineas

An unique essay, much needed, explaining how time and solitude is needed to be able to create, and how women have been deprived of it for centuries. How much writers, poets, great artists have we lost through history by not considering women as equals to men? A real food for thought, still vital even decades after it was written.

I gleaned three “truths” from this essay:

1. Anger is an emotion that warps creativity
2. Poverty is a state that generates fear and bitterness (“intellectual freedom depends on material things”)
3. (and this is the one I find to be more truthy than true) Only a truly androgynous mind can be unfettered by rage and produce works of “genius”. As Woolf posits, “it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex.” To a certain extent, I agree. To this day, men's writing often finds itself acrid in the “shadow of the ‘I'” from which no truth can grow - there is no question that ego dominance in a narrative chokes all possible oxygen sources. However, writing as a woman does not necessarily need to result in “sacrifice to the man with the measuring rod” - righteous anger at the status quo does not inherently equate to deference.

Briefly, her obsession with purity in the form of creation rings a bit hypocritical next to her criticisms of chastity as a virtue.
4. (cheating) I really ought to read Jane Eyre one day.