![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This collection of essays, reviews and critical works brings together some of Woolf’s shorter works on women and writing, women and politics, and women and art. It is probably best read as a companion piece to *A Room of One’s Own*.
My favourite essays are those in which she is most intemperate and pointed, such as her letter to *New Statesman* in response to a book review by her friend Desmond MacCarthy (writing as Affable Hawk) who accepted the proposition that there had not been a single great woman artist. With vitriol Woolf wrote:
‘Naturally, I cannot claim I know Greek as Mr Bennett and Affable Hawk know it, but I have often been told that Sapho was a woman, and that Plato and Aristotle placed her with Homer and Archilochus among the greatest of their poets. That Mr Bennett can name fifty of the male sex who are indisputably her superior is therefore a welcome surprise, and if he will publish their names I will promise, as an act of that submission which is so dear to my sex, not only to buy their works but, so far as my faculties allow, to learn them by heart.’
Affable Hawk responded:
‘If the freedom and education of women is impeded by the expression of my views, I shall argue no more.’
My favourite essays are those in which she is most intemperate and pointed, such as her letter to *New Statesman* in response to a book review by her friend Desmond MacCarthy (writing as Affable Hawk) who accepted the proposition that there had not been a single great woman artist. With vitriol Woolf wrote:
‘Naturally, I cannot claim I know Greek as Mr Bennett and Affable Hawk know it, but I have often been told that Sapho was a woman, and that Plato and Aristotle placed her with Homer and Archilochus among the greatest of their poets. That Mr Bennett can name fifty of the male sex who are indisputably her superior is therefore a welcome surprise, and if he will publish their names I will promise, as an act of that submission which is so dear to my sex, not only to buy their works but, so far as my faculties allow, to learn them by heart.’
Affable Hawk responded:
‘If the freedom and education of women is impeded by the expression of my views, I shall argue no more.’
