A very queer, composite being thus emerges.  Imaginatively she is of

the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She

pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from

history.  She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in

fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her

finger.  Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound

thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly

read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

     It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the

historians first and the poets afterwards--a worm winged like an 

eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet.


			  *  *  *  *  *

     Sic evadit persona inauditissima, composita quoque, opere poetico

gravissima, negotioso omnino levis.  Illa versibus passim invenitur,

annalibus paene abest, quae regit regum vitas victorumque versibus,

et historiis fuit famula pueri cuiuslibet genitores ipsam ei nubere

coegissent.  Ex ore illius verba divina, sententiae altissimae litterarum

fluunt dum in vita cotidiana vix legere, aegre scribere potuit, et viro

fuit res.

     Primum libros historicorum legere deinde poetarum prodigium equidem

profert inusitatum--serpens quasi aquila alatus; genius vitae formaeque in

culina sebum secans.




		--Virginia Woolf, "In Search of a Room of One's Own"