Reading Notes W12: Woolf, Part A

• "Women must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (339)
• Mary Beton/Seton/Carmichael are all acceptable names for Mary (340)
• Poetry excites people to feelings like abandonment or rupture is because it celebrates some feeling that one used to have. (345)
• Comparison of how many books are written about men compared to women (352)
• Women do not write books about men (353)
• If there were indisputable proofs arguing about how women are inferior to men then it wouldn't be so hard to not be angry. But that isn't the case (357)
• Woolf's aunt, Mary Beton, died by falling off of her horse when she went for a ride to get some air in Bombay (359)
• "Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do" (360)
• "All assumptions founded on the facts observed when women were the protected sex will have disappeared" (361)
• "Women are poorer than men..."and "perhaps now it would be better to give up seeking for the truth" (361)
• From Professor Trevelyan's History of England: Wife-beating was a recognized right of man and practiced without shame by high and low (362)
• I was really surprised when I read that. I could understand the idea of giving men power over their wives in a patriarchal society but I would have imagined that abusing one's wife would be seen as a punishable offense of some sort. Even if it resulted in less of a severe punishment to beat one's wife as opposed to beating some random male-- something. To have this just be practiced without shame makes me imagine that it was as common to see a husband beating his wife as it was to see him playing a sport.
• Edgar Allan Poe was mentioned and his name caught my eye immediately for no apparent reason other than the fact that I recognize him and enjoy some of his poetry. Didn't have the same reaction for Shakespeare. Probably because I've had to read too much of Shakespeare's works in the past year. (364)
• Women who were born with a gift of poetry in the 16th century were unhappy woman; "a woman at strife against herself" (367)
• We are not held up by some "revelation" which reminds us of the writer (371)

Woolf, Virginia. "A Room of One's Own." The Norton Anthology World Literature, edited by Martin Puchner, Third Edition, vol. F, W. W. Norton 2012, pp. 336-371