Thinking of the 8th of March Again

“This was, in (Virginia) Woolf’s view, the archetypal female writer’s fate: ‘so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.’ It is far easier, she suggests, to find ‘some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor’ than one who ‘blazes out’ of obscurity.”

—Edward Rothstein