Beatriz Baptista > Recent Status Updates

“Indeed, it was delightful to read a man's writing again. (…) It indicated such freedom of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in himself. One had a sense of physical well-being in the presence of this well-nourished, well-educated, free mind, which had never been thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it liked.”

“Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought.”

“(…) made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness?”

“It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only?”

“There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women, there are no yard measures, neatly divided into the fractions of an inch, that one can lay against the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter, or the fidelity of a sister, or the capacity of a housekeeper.”

“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!”

“It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.“

“Cleopatra's only feeling about Octavia is one of jealously. (…) But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. (…) And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends.”

“Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”

COMO ASSIM ISTO FOI ESCRITO EM 1928, QUASE 100 ANOS ATRÁS! MISS VIRGINIA WOLF

“This terseness, this shortwindedness, might mean that she was afraid of something; afraid of being called "sentimental' perhaps; or she remembers that women's writing has been called fowery and so provides a superfluity of thorns;”

“She may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression.”

“And yet, I continued, approaching the bookcase again, where shall I find that elaborate study of the psychology of women by a woman? If through their incapacity to play football women are not going to be allowed to practise medicine-“

“They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronizing, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them, like some too conscientious governess, adjuring them, like Sir Egerton Brydges, to be refined; dragging even into the criticism of poetry criticism of sex.”

+ “Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Bronte. It is another feather; perhaps the finest, in theit caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write.”

“But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking.” +

“What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens. One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one reads.”

“(…) thinking back on any famous novel, is one of infinite complexity, because it is thus made up of so many different judge-ments, of so many different kinds of emotion. The wonder is that any book so composed holds together for more than a year or two, or can possibly mean to the English reader what it means for the Russian or the Chinese. But they do hold together occasionally very remarkably.”

“Life conflicts with something that is not life.
Hence the difficulty of coming to any agreement about novels, and the immense sway that our private prejudices have upon us.”

+ “Had Tolstoy lived at the Priority in seclusion with a married lady ‘cut off from what is called the world’, however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written War and Peace.”

“At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely (…) picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books.” +

“She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?”

+ “and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel, they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer;” +

+ “To Jane Austen there was something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice. And, I wondered, would Pride and Prejudice have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it hecessary to hide her manuscript from visitors?”

“Without boasting or giving pain to the opposite sex, one may say that Pride and Prejudice is a good book. At any rate, one would not have been ashamed to have been caught in the act of writing Pride and Prejudice. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in.” +

“If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain, - women never have an half hour . . . that they can call their own' - she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required.”

“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

“(…) one can measure the opposition that was in the air to a woman writing when one finds that even a woman with a great turn for writing has brought herself to believe that to write a book was to be ridiculous, even to show oneself distracted.”

“They were very different, but alike in this that both were noble and both childless, and both were married to the best of husbands. In both burnt the same passion for poetry and both are disfigured and deformed by the same causes.”

“It was a thousand pities that the woman who could write like that, whose mind was tuned to nature and reflection, should have been forced to anger and bitterness. But how could she have helped herself. I asked, imagining the sneers and the laughter, the adulation of the toadies, the scepticism of the professional poet.”