AP English Language — Mixed Skills II — Drill 3

The following text is adapted from Virginia Woolf's essay "Professions for Women," delivered as a speech to the Women's Service League in London in 1931. When I came to write, I discovered that there was a very strange creature standing between me and the paper. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught, she herself sat in it — in short, she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all — I need not say it — she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty — her blushes, her great grace. In those days — the last of Queen Victoria — every house had its Angel in the House. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the sound of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in hand to review a man's book, she slipped behind me and whispered: 'My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.' And she made as if to guide my pen. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I am to have one, is that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her, she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. What is the use of telling you that I had to fight such a phantom, and that this phantom was part of my own self? For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a bad novel without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And for expressing such opinions, women writers have been criticized and silenced for generations. The freedom to write must therefore also mean the freedom to have an opinion — and to express it, without apology, regardless of whether it is pleasing, flattering, or pure.