Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Literary Witches

“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.
                           Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

2 comments:

ilTassista Marino said...

In fact, Armida's speeches in Tasso's Jerusalem-poems are full of quotations from Dante :-)

Carter Kaplan said...

You have an understanding of these matters, evidently.