By BarbaraAnne:

This is my friend Miriam’s art studio. I see its silent, sunlit beauty. I also see all the gifted women who never had a hope in the world to get a space like this.

Jane Austen wrote in between tasks in her sewing room.

Emily Dickinson became mentally ill, wrote 800 unpublished poems by hand. Then she carefully arranged and hid them in hand-made books, which were only discovered after her death. Men heavily edited Dickinson until Thomas Johnson finally published her work as written in 1955, 109 years later.

Charlotte Bronte first released Jane Eyre under a man’s name.

Mary Ann Evans had to publish under a male pseudonym her entire career.

Emily Bronte could not bear to live, after realizing her philosophy was doomed in the real world.

This picture represents women’s liberation, the revolution realized. And unlike men, our symbol of victory is not a monument to death in “blazing glory,” but a quiet place, where we take the power to make war irrelevant.

Virginia Wolfe’s A Room of One’s Own, because they need to be said — every day.

“Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.

“Now and again an Emily Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. 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, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

“Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

Filed under: Style, Angst