Thank you for this, Allen, so full of gems of observation and beautifully written. You make me want to re-read Gaskell, whom I haven't read since graduate school in the early 90s. I recently re-read Woolf's *A Room of One's Own* and was somewhat surprised by how foolish it was, and full of provable falsehoods about women in the past. Woolf's bitterness and discontent shadow much of her thinking. What an unsympathetic portrait of Henry James! (Of course she didn't know, writing rather caustically, that she would never reach a stuffy old age.) But you've made me seek out "A Haunted House."
I re-read "A Room" also and was amazed. Such stuff--men writing only with the male sides of their brains, she says, and it is a mistake for women to read them. She had a way of wrapping her psychosis inside unexpected observations and details. The originality is striking. Then that fades and you have to wonder how distorted her thinking was.
Thank you for this, Allen, so full of gems of observation and beautifully written. You make me want to re-read Gaskell, whom I haven't read since graduate school in the early 90s. I recently re-read Woolf's *A Room of One's Own* and was somewhat surprised by how foolish it was, and full of provable falsehoods about women in the past. Woolf's bitterness and discontent shadow much of her thinking. What an unsympathetic portrait of Henry James! (Of course she didn't know, writing rather caustically, that she would never reach a stuffy old age.) But you've made me seek out "A Haunted House."
I re-read "A Room" also and was amazed. Such stuff--men writing only with the male sides of their brains, she says, and it is a mistake for women to read them. She had a way of wrapping her psychosis inside unexpected observations and details. The originality is striking. Then that fades and you have to wonder how distorted her thinking was.
Equalty on all things.
Equal rights and opportunities....
Then the things feminists hate talking about
Equal responsibilities and consequences