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A Room of One's Own (1991)
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I'm back from speaking of Girton in floods of rain starve but valiant young women that's my impression intelligent eager poor and destined to become school mistresses in shoals I blandly told them to drink wine and had a room of their own I felt elderly and mature and nobody respected me they were very eager egotistical or rather not much impressed by age group you did a little reverence or that sort of thing about in 1928. Virginia Woolf was invited to Cambridge to talk to a small group of young women at Girton College the title of her lecture was a Room of One's Own but you may say we asked you to speak about women and fiction what does that got to do with a room of one's own I will try to explain when you asked me to speak to you about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of the river here in Cambridge and began to wonder what the words meant they might mean a few remarks about Fanny Burney a few more by Jane Austen a tribute to the bronty's with a sketch of how earth passed near jaundice know some witticisms if possible about miss. Medford a respectful allusion to George. Eliot a reference to mrs. Gaskill one would have done but but second side the word seemed not so simple the title women and fiction might mean and you might have meant it to mean women and what they are like or women and the fiction they write or women and the fiction that is written about them or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably linked and when I came to consider that this was the most interesting possibility I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback I should never be able to come to a conclusion I should never be able to fulfill what I understand is the first duty of a lecturer to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth for you to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece all I can do is offer an opinion upon one minor point a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. I was sitting on the banks of the river for week or two ago and fine October weather lost in thought the river reflected whatever it shows of sky and bridge and burning tree and an undergraduate was poling his boat through the reflections women and fiction and the need to come to some conclusion bowed my head to the ground there I might have sat the top rung lost in thought when you know the little tug the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line it became all at once very exciting and important and set up such a tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot instantly a man's figure rose to intercept me nor did I first understand but the gesticulations of a curious looking object in a cutaway coat an evening shirt were fingered me his face expressing horror and indignation he was a Beadle I was a woman this was the turf there was the path only a fellows and scholars are allowed here the gravel was the place for me such thoughts were the work of a moment as I regained the path the arms of the Beatles sang his face regained its usual repose and although turf is better walking than gravel no very great harm was done the spirit of peace descended like a cloud for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere it is in the courts and quadrangles of Cambridge on a fine October day as chance would have it some stray memory of some old essay about revisiting Cambridge in the long vacation brought Charles lab to mind certainly he wrote an essay the name escapes me about seeing the original manuscript of one of milton's poems there lissa death perhaps and land road had shocked him to think that any word of listeners could be different from wattages I amused myself by guessing which word it could have been that milton had altered and why when it suddenly occurred to me that the very manuscript itself which lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yards away and I could follow Lambs footsteps across the quadrangle to the famous library where the treasure is kept I was just opening the door which leads to the library when as instantly they issued like a guardian angel barring the way with a flatter a black gown instead of white wings a deprecating silvery kindly gentleman who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies were only admitted to the library if accompanied by a fellow of the college or furnished with a letter of introduction but a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library venerable and calm its treasure safe locked within its breasts it sleeps complacently and well so far as I'm concerned so seek forever never will I wake those echoes never will I ask for that hospitality again I vowed as I descended the steps in anger but the clock stuck it was time to make my way to garden for dinner. Deena was being served in the Great Hall everybody was assembled dinner was ready here was my soup it was a plane gravy soup there was nothing to stir the fancy in that one could see through the transparent liquid any pattern that might have been on the plate itself but there was no pattern the plate was plain next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes a homely Trinity suggesting the romps of cattle in a muddy market and straps curled and yellowed at the edge and bargaining and cheering and women with string bags on Monday mornings there was no reason to complain of human nature's daily food seeing that the supply was sufficient and coalminers darkness was sitting down to this prunes and custard followed now if anyone complains the prunes even when mitigated with custard are an uncharitable vegetable for fruit they are not stringy as amazed as heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in a misers veins you should affect that there are people whose charity embraces even the Putin biscuits and cheese came next to clear the water jug was passed liberally round the table for it is the nature of biscuits to be dry and these were biscuits to the core but that was all the meal was over everybody spread their chairs back soon the hall was emptied of any sign of food and made very no doubt for breakfast the next morning up to staircases and down corridors the youth of England went banging and seen and was it for the guests a stranger to say dinner was not good by now I was alone with my friend let us call her Mary Seaton in her sitting-room and happily at my friend who taught science had a cupboard where there was a squat bottle and little glasses so we were able to draw up to the fire and repair some of the damages of the day's living I thought it best to expose what was in my mind the air so I asked miss Seaton this college where when are sitting what lies beneath it's gallant red brick and wild unkempt grasses of the garden what force lies behind that plain China of which we dined and the beef and the custard and the prunes well said Mary Seaton on about the Year 1860 over to know the story she said bored I suppose with the recital and she told me Romans were hired committees met envelopes will address circulars drawn up meetings were held letters read out servants promised so much mr. Sansa won't give a thing the Saturday Review has been very rude how are we going to pay for the offices shall behold a bazaar what about a concert can we get a pretty girl to sit in the front row can anyone get the editor of The Times to print a letter can we get anything to sign it lady thing is out of town well that was the way it was done presumably 60 years ago and it was a prodigious effort the founder of this college Emily Davis said we ought to ask for 30,000 at least it is not a large sum considering there is but one college of the sort for. Great Britain Ireland and the colonies and considering how easy it is to raise immense sums for boys schools but considering how few people rarely wish women to be educated at all it is a very great deal so obviously we cannot have wine and partridges and servants carrying tin trays on their heads that my friend we cannot have sofas and separate rooms every penny that could be scraped together or set aside for the building the amenities will have to wait and so we talked standing at the window looking down as many thousands do every night on the domes and towers of the famous city beneath us the gentleman's colleges look very beautiful very mysterious in the autumn moonlight the old stone with white and venerable I thought of all the books that were assembled I'm heir of the pictures of old credits and were these hanging in panel drums of the painted windows and the fountains and the grass of the quiet rooms looking across squired quadrangles fund I thought to whom I must admit of the admirable smoke drink of the deep armchairs and pleasant carpets of the urbanity the geniality the dignity which are the offspring of luxury privacy and space certainly our mothers not provided us with anything comparable to all this our mothers who found it difficult to raise 30,000 pounds no there could be no doubt about it for some reason or other our mothers had mismanaged their affairs very gravely penny could be spared for amenities the partridges and why for beetles and turf for books and cigars for libraries and leisure to raise bare walls out of the bare earth was the most they could do the inevitable sequel to that visit to Cambridge had started a swarm of questions in my mind which seemed to demand unfortunately a visit to the British Museum why did men drink wine and women water why was one sex of prosperous and the other so poor what effect had poverty on fiction what conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art I need answers not questions and an answer can only be had by consulting the learner and the competitors if truth cannot be found among the shareholders of the British Museum then where is truth I wonder if you have any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year have you any notion how many are written by men are you young women aware that you are perhaps the most discussed animal in the universe I thought there was I with notebook and pencil proposing to spend a morning reading and supposing that by the end of the morning I should have transferred the truth to my notebook but I should need to be a herd of elephants to cope with all this in despair around my eyes up and down the long list of titles sex in its nature might well attract doctors and biologists what was much more difficult to explain was by sex women that is also attracts messes light-fingered novelists young men with an MA degree men with no degree at all men with no apparent qualifications whatsoever saved that they were not women professor's school masters sociologists clergymen novelists essayist journalists all chasing my simple and single question why are women poor every page of my notebook was scribbled over with notes the heading was women and poverty but what followed it was women habits in the Fiji Islands of weaker in moral sense then South Sea Islanders age of puberty among attractiveness of offered a sacrifice to small size of brain of less hair on the body of love of children of weaker muscles of vanity of. Shakespeare's opinion or dr. Johnson's opinion all and so on how on earth. Samuel Butler write wise men never say what they think of women as far as I could see wise men never say anything else I couldn't possibly go home and there's a serious contribution to my study of women and fiction that women had less hair on their bodies than men or that the age of puberty among South. Sea Islanders was 9 what is it 90 what I had been pondering where I should have been coming to a conclusion I had been sketching a face a figure it was the face and figure of Professor von X engaged in writing his monumental work entitled the mental model and physical inferiority of the female sex he was not a man attractive to women heavily built he had a great drought balance that he have very small eyes he was very red in the face his expression suggested that he was laboring under some emotion which made him jab his pen of his paper as if he was killing some obnoxious insect and even when he had killed it that still did not satisfy him he must go on killing it even then some cause for anger and irritation remains could it be his wife I wondered was she in love with a cavalry officer slim and elegant and dressed in Astrakhan Oh to adopt the. Freudian theory had he been laughed at in his cradle by a pretty girl for even in his cradle I do not think the professor had been an attractive child anyway for whatever reason the professor was made to look very angry and very unattractive in my drawing but why well all the professor's angry I thought it better to narrow the inquiry and turn to the historian who records not opinions but facts to find out under what conditions women live not throughout the centuries but in England say at the time of Elizabeth for it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man it seemed was capable of a song or a sonnet so I turned to Professor Trevelyan history of. England once more I looked up women found positional and turning to the pages indicated I come across this wife-beating was a recognized right of man and was practiced without shame by high as well as low similarly the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents choice was liable to be locked up beaten and flung about the room without any shock inflicted on public opinion marriage was not an affair of personal affection but a family avarice particularly in the upper classes the truth will often took place while one or both parties were in the cradle and marriage when they were scarcely out of the nurses charge now this passage refers to 1470 soon after the time of Chaucer the next reference we have the position of women comes some 200 years later at the time of the Stuart's it was saw the exception of a women of upper and middle class to choose their own husbands and when a husband had been assigned he was Lord and Master so far as law and custom could make him yet even serve neither. Shakespeare's women nor those of authentic seventeenth-century memoirs seemed wanting in personality and character I'll certainly if we consider it Cleopatra must have had a way with her. Lady Macbeth one would suppose had a will of her own Rosalind one might conclude was an attractive girl Professor Trevelyan was speaking no more than the truth when he said that. Shakespeare's women did not seem lacking in personality and character indeed not being an historian one might go further and say that women had burnt like beacons in the works of poets from the beginning of time Clytemnestra. Antigone fedra Cressida Desdemona the. Duchess of Malfi Milliman Becky shark. Anna Karenina Emma Bovary had a table the names flocked mind nor do they recall women lacking in personality and character indeed if woman had no existence saving the works of fiction written by man I might imagine her to be a person of the utmost importance very various heroic and mean splendid and sordid infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme as great as a man some might think even greater but this is woman in fiction in fact as. Professor Trevelyan points out she was locked up beaten and flung about the room so a very queer composit being thus emerges imaginative issues of the highest importance practically she is completely insignificant she pervades poetry from cover to cover she's all but absent from history in fiction she dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced her wing upon her finger the most inspired words the most profound thoughts fall from her lips in literature in real life she could hardly read could scarcely spell and was the unique property of her husband but it's certainly a strange monster one makes up if one reads the historians first and the poet second a worm wings like an eagle the spirit of beauty in the kitchen chopping up suet but here am I asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age and I'm not sure how they were educated whether they were taught to write whether they had sitting-rooms how many of them had children before the age of 21 what in short they did between 8 in the morning and 8 at night but they had no money evidently according to Professor. Trevelyan they were married whether they liked it or not before they were out of the nursery it would have been extremely hard even on this showing if one of them had suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare and I thought of that old gentleman who is dead now but was a bishop who declared that it was impossible for any woman past present or to come to have the genius of Shakespeare he wrote to the papers about it he also told a lady who applied him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven although they do have souls of a sort how much thinking those both gentlemen used to save one how the borders of ignorant shrank back their approach cats do not go to heaven women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare be that as it may I cannot help agreeing with the bishop at least in this that it would have been impossible for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare Shakespeare himself went very probably his mother was an heiress to the Grammar School there he may have learned Latin and the elements of grammar and logic he was it as well-known a wild boy who poached rabbits perhaps shot a deer and had rather sooner than he should have done to marry a woman in the neighborhood who bore him a child rather quicker than was right that escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London he had it seemed a taste for the theatre tradition tells us he started by holding horses at the stage door soon he got work in the theatre he became a successful actor living the hub of the universe meeting everybody knowing everybody practising his art upon the boards and exercising his wit in the streets and even gaining access to the Palace of the Queen but I like to imagine mmm since facts are hard to come by the cheeks beer had a wonderfully gifted sister called. Judith let us say she was as adventurous as imaginative as a god to see the world as he was she was not sent to school she had no chance of learning grammar and logic let alone of reading Latin she picked up a book known again perhaps one of her brothers and read a few pages but then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not a moon about with books she scribbled a few pages on the sly up in the Apple loft but was careful to hide them what set fire to them soon however before she was out of her teens she was betrothed to the son of a neighboring wool stapler she cried out that manage was hateful to her and for that she was severely beaten by her father she made a small parcel of her belongings let herself down by rope one summers night and took the road to. London she was not 17 the birds that sang in the hitches were not more musical than she was she had the quickest fancier gift like her brothers for the tune of words like him too she had a taste for the theater she stood at the stage door she wanted to act she said men laughed in her face the manager a fat loose lipped manga Ford and bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting no woman he said could possibly be an actress he hinted you can imagine what she could find no training in her craft but could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight yet her genius was perfection and she lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women in the study of their ways at last but she was very young oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face the same grey eyes the same rounded brows the last Nick green the actor manager took pity on her she found herself with child by their gentlemen so. Who can measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when court entangled in a woman's body and so she killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at the crossroads where the Omnibus is now stopped outside the. Elephant and Castle that more or less is how I think the story would run if any woman in. Shakespeare's day had had Shakespeare's genius but for my part now I agree with the deceased mission it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's day short of had Shakespeare's genius yet genius of some sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the labouring classes now and again and Emily Bronte or Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence but it certainly never got itself onto paper when however one reads of a witch being dumped or of a woman possessed by Devils what of a wise woman selling herb or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother then I think we were onto the track of some lost novelist some repressed poet some mutant inglorious Emily Bronte - her brains out on the moors or mocked and mode on the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put a do indeed I venture to suggest that uh norm who wrote sermon appearance without signing them was often a woman and I suggest it was a woman who made the. Ballards and folk songs crooning them to her children beguiling her spinning with them along the length of a winter's evening that may be true it may be false who can say but what is true it seems to me is that any woman born with a great gift in the 16th century would certainly have gone crazed shot herself or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village Partridge ha wizard feared and mocked at to have lived a free life in London in the 16th century would have meant for any woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might have killed her contacted Lee had she survived when one looks at the shelves of books where there are no plays by women and no poetry by women she would have gone unsigned chastity maybe a fetish invented by certain societies were unknown reasons but it had been and still has now a religious importance in women's lives and it is a relic of that sense of chastity which has dictated anonymity to women and to even late in the nineteenth century. Cara Ellis Acton Belle George Eliot Joe saw all victims of inner strife as their writings prove sort ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man so it was a pattern that even late in the 19th century a woman was not encouraged to be an artist on the contrary she was snubbed slapped lectured and exhorted a mind must have been strained and her vitality lured by the need of opposing this and disproving that for here we come within range of that very interesting and obscure masculine complex that deep-seated desire not so much the tree should be inferior but that he shall be superior which class him wherever one looks not only in front of the Arts but barring the way to politics to the even lady best black with all her passion for politics hungry Bowser self and rights to her fen lady loosen gore notwithstanding my violence in politics and talking so much from that subject I perfectly agree with you that no woman has any right to meddle with that or with any serious business other than giving her opinion if she is asked but what one finds amusing now when one thinks of lady besra had to be taken in desperate honest ones have opinions that one now pastes in a book labeled cockadoodle dumb drew tears once I can assure you amongst your grandmothers and great-grandmother's there were many who wet their eyes and Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony mano burr it is opening all for you you have got yourselves to college and enjoy sitting rooms even bed sitting rooms of your own for you to say Jean you should disregard. Japan's genius should be above caring of the world says of it unfortunately it is precisely the men and women of genius mind most of all what is said of them remember heat remember the words he had kept on his tombstone will think of Tennyson think of but I need hardly multiply examples of the undeniable if very unfortunate fact that it is the nature of the artist of mind excessively what is said of him literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond all reason the opinion of others because the mind of the artist in order to achieve the prodigious effort a freeing whole an entire the work that is in him must be incandescent like Shakespeare's mind there must be no obstacle no foreign matter unconsumed all desire to protest to preach to proclaim an injury to pay off an old score to make the world witness to some hardship must be fired out and consumed as it was in Shakespeare's mind oh the poetry flows out of him free and unimpeded if ever a human being expressed his work completely it is Shakespeare perhaps that's why we know so little about him his grudges his hates his antipathy as a hidden promise if ever mind it was incandescent unimpeded it is. Shakespeare's mind that one would ever find any woman in that state of mind in the 16th century was impossible and now we turn a very important corner of the road we come to mrs. Aphra Behn a woman forced by the death of her husband to earn her living by her wits she had to work on equal terms with men and by working very hard she made enough to live on not the importance of that fact outweighs anything that she ever actually wrote for Aphra Behn proof that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice of perhaps a more agreeable qualities and was of practical importance and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and of a distracted mind the extreme activity of mind among women later in the 18th century meeting the talking the writing of essays the translation of the classics was founded on the solid fact that women could make money by writing and money dignifies what is frivolous is unpaid for and so later in the 18th century a change came about which if I was rewriting history I should find a greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses the middle-class woman began to write for if Pride and. Prejudice matters if Middlemarch of. Wuthering Heights if banette matter then it matters far more than I can prove in an hour's discourse that women generally and not just the lonely Aleister Pratt took to writing for without those forerunners. Jane Austen and the bronty's and George. Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without. Marlo or Marla without Chaucer or. Chaucer without those forgotten poets who tame the natural savagery of our tongue for masterpieces are not single and solitary efforts they are the outcome of years of thinking in common so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. Jane Austen should lay a wreath on the grave of Fanny Burney and George Eliot knew homage to the robust shade of an Isaac Carter that valiant old woman who tied a belt her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek and women everywhere should let flowers fall on the tomb of mrs. Aphra Behn which is scandalously but rather appropriately in. Westminster Abbey for she it was who earned them the right to speak their mind for now that Aphra Behn had done it girls could go to their parents and say you need not give me an allowance I can make money by my pen of course for years to come the answer was yes by leading the life of Aphra Behn death would be better but it is she shady and amorous though she was makes it not quite fantastic for me to say two huge night earn 500 a year by your wits it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want for wife without boasting or giving pain to the opposite sex one may say that Pride and. Prejudice is a good book certainly I'm not alone in saying that I should not have been ashamed of being caught in the act of writing Pride and Prejudice but Jane Austen was glad that a door hinge. Creek that she might hide her manuscript if anyone came in to Jane Austen there was something discreditable in writing. Pride and Prejudice but the chief miracle is that there is no sign that had she not had to hide her manuscript. Pride and Prejudice would have been a better book here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hatred without bitterness without fear without preaching and when people compared as they rightly do Shakespeare and Jane Austen they mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word she wrote and so does Shakespeare if she suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of the life that was imposed upon her she never traveled she never rode through London in an omnibus she never had luncheon in a shop by herself but perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what should not got but was that true of Charlotte Bronte the woman who wrote Jane Eyre had more genius in her than Jane Austen but she will write of herself when she should write of her characters she cannot express her genius hold an entire she's at war with her lot how could she help but die young cramped and forted but play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if Charlotte Bronte had possessed say 300 a year in fact the foolish woman sewed the copyright of her novels outright for 1,500 pounds but she knew no one better how enormous Lee a genius would have profited if experience in intercourse and travel had been granted her they were not granted they were withheld and I asked you to accept the fact that all those wonderful novels select Emma watering Heights Middlemarch were written by women with no more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman written to in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so poor but while writing weathering Heights. Emilie promptly could only afford a few choirs of writing papers a time as well naturally as cooking and ironing for the family and both kneading and baking the bread what genius what integrity Emily Bronte must have needed in the face of all that opposition in the midst of that purely patriarchal society to hold fast the thing without shrinking only she and Jane Austen did it perhaps that was the finest feather in their caps they wrote as women right not as men right there alone ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue to think this right that there learn with death to that persistent voice not rumbling now domineering now grieve not shocked not angry now avuncular that voice which cannot let women alone this must be at them like a conscientious deafness assuring them to be refined even into the politicus and the poetry criticism of sex admonishing them if they would be good and when sun shining prize to keep within certain limits to acknowledge the limitations of their sex I'm not going to stir those old fools but it would have needed a very store word young woman in 1828 too ignored all those snubs and chidings and promises of prizes huh what a firebrand she would need to be to say oh but you can't buy literature too literature is open to everybody now I refuse to allow you Beadle there you are to turn me off the grass lock up your libraries if you like there is no gate no lock no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind but perhaps to think as I have been thinking of one sex as distinct from the other is a method it is fatal for anyone to be a man or woman pure and simple one must be woman manly or man womanly it is especially fatal for any woman to lay the least stress on any grievance to plead even with justice and he calls to speak in any way consciously as a woman and fatal is not just a mere figure of speech for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death it ceases to be fertilized brilliant and effective powerful and masterly it may appear for a day or two it must wither at night for it cannot grow in the minds of others some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the man and the woman for the art of creation to be accomplished some marriage of opposites has to be consummated there must be freedom there must be peace not a Wilms great what-a-light glimmer the curtain should be glue strong and when his experience is over the writer should lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness here I should stop but the pressure of convention degrees that I should end with a pet eration when I rummaged about in my mind I can find no noble sentiments about being companions and equals and influencing the world higher ends all I find myself saying simply and prosaically is that it is more important much more to be yourselves than anything else do not dream of influencing other people I would say if I knew how to make it sound exalted think of things in themselves women are hard on women women dislike women but I often like women I like their unconventionality I like that anonymity what I particularly like about women but are you not sick to death of the word I can assure you I am so let me adopt a sterner term young women please attend the peroration is beginning you are in my opinion disgracefully ignorant you have never made the discovery of any sort of importance you've never shaken an empire you have never led an army into battle the plays of Shakespeare and the symphonies of Beethoven are not by you nor have you introduced the blessings of civilization to a barbarous race what is your excuse it's all very well for you to say pointing to the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black and white and coffee colored inhabitants all busily engaged in traffic and enterprise and lovemaking we have had other work on our hands I told you before Shakespeare had a sister she died young alas she never wrote a word she lies buried at the crossroads where the. Omnibus has not stopped outside the. Elephant and Castle now it is my belief that this poet who never read a word and lies buried of the crossroads still lives she lives in you and she lives in me and in many other woman's were not here tonight because they're washing up the dishes of putting the children to bed but she lives for great poets do not die they are continuing presences they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh now I think that opportunity is now coming within your power to give her for it is my belief that if we live another century or so and I'm talking about the common life the real life not the little separate lives we live as individuals if we have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not only in relation to each other but in relation to reality the sky the trees whatever it may be if we look past Milton's dirty for no human being should shut out the view if we face the fact for which is a fact that there is no arm to cling to and there we go alone and that a relationship is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women that opportunity will come and Shakespeare's dead sister will take up the body she is so often lay down throwing her life from the lives of the unknown who will have foreigners like her brother before her she will be born now as for her coming without that preparation without that method without that determination that when she is born again it would be possible for her to live and write her poetry that we cannot expect well that is impossible but I maintain she will come if we work for her and that to achieve that end even in poverty and obscurity is worthwhile literature he's open to everybody I refuse to allow you beetle though you are to turn me off the grass look up your libraries if you like there is no gate no knock no boat that you can set upon the freedom of my mind |
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