if a woman were to have written she would have had to overcome enormous circumstances. Women were betrothed in their cradles; they were married at fifteen; they bore a dozen children, and those children died, and they went on bearing children. Moreover, they were uneducated; they had no privacy; even Jane Austen had to write in the common sitting room and hide her work under blotting paper so as not to be discovered. Yet even when they were freed from the practical impediments imposed upon their sex, they could not write because they had no tradition to follow.
