Today I celebrate Samhain, the Pagan holy day of celebrating those who came before us. It's a day to reflect and remember. Let's take a moment to remember all those women writers who came before us. Some of them, only their words and fragments of their work survives...their name is lost to the winds of history. But let's speak of herstory today. Let us remember those ghosts and imagine their faces. Their names lost to us perhaps just because they were women or maybe because they were wild women by the standards of their day, even thought as such because they dared to write and express their deepest selves. Let us give them a place in our memory for what is remembered lives.
Virginia Woolf knew where we could find them so we could put them back into history...herstory.
“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
Virginia Woolf knew where we could find them so we could put them back into history...herstory.
“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
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