16.1 Writing a woman’s life

• Female writers mentioned in the book: Dorothy Sayers, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf

• Moratorium: a seemingly confused, aimless period in youth that is actually unconscious preparation for the task ahead

• quest plot, questing is what makes a woman the heroine of her own life.

• women must turn to one another for stories; they must share the stories of their lives and their hopes and unacceptable fantasies.

• He (James Brabazon) recognizes the possibility that it is precisely not having been sexually attractive in youth that enables women to develop the ego-strength to be creative and ultimately part of the instrumental rather than the expressive world in adulthood.

• Sayers:“If the trousers do not attract you, so much the worse; for the moment I do not want to attract you. I want to enjoy myself as a human being.”

• Marriage is the most persistent of myths imprisoning women, and misleading those who write of women’s lives.

• Women have long been nameless. They have not been persons. Handed by a father to another man, the husband. They have been objects of circulation, exchanging one name for another.