Beatriz Baptista > Recent Status Updates

“The human race is split up for her into two parties. Men are the 'opposing faction'; men are hated and feared, because they have the power to bar her way to what she wants to do - which is to write.”

“But one would also expect to find that her mind was disturbed by alien emotions like fear and hatred and that her poems showed traces of that disturbance.”

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

alguém que traga a mulher de volta, eu preciso

“(…) even in the nineteenth century a (woman was not encouraged to be an artist, On the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured, and exhorted. Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that.”

“The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What's the good of your writing?”

“To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination.“

“No girl could have walked to London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the presence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence and suffering an anguish which may have been irrational.”

“This may be true or it may be false - who can say? - but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare's sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.”

😭😭

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, (…) crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.”

“But what I find deplorable, (…) is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century. I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that. Here am I asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated; (…) how many women had children before they were out of the nursery, at fifteen or sixteen very likely.”

“Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation, I thought, opening the door. But what bearing has all this upon the subject of my paper, Women and Fiction? I asked, going indoors.”

“(…) what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house, and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.”

PERIOD SLAAAAAY

“Life for both sexes - and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement - is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle.”

!!!!!

“Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.”

“Yet it seemed absurd, (…) that a man with all this power should be angry. Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the attendant sprite on power? Rich people, for example, are often angry because they suspect that the poor want to seize their wealth.”

“England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and the influence. (…) With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry.”

“Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”

“Women do not write books about men - a fact that I could not help welcoming with relief (…)”

“Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex - women, that is to say - also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.”

EU AMO UMA VIRGINIA WOLF

“and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer (…)”

“Certainly our mothers had not provided us with anything comparable to all this - our mothers who found it difficult to scrape together thirty thousand pounds, our mothers who bore thirteen children to ministers of religion at St Andrews.”

“Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children - no human being could stand it. (…)(…) it is equally useless to ask what might have happened if Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth (…), because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned.”

“(…) we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex. What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses?”

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction.”

+ “One does not recognize it in the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the difficulty of modern poetry.”

“The very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (…), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment.” +

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybodys but oneself.”