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booted and furred that their dressing in the afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselves put away in cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout the summer months. They cross the road when the lamps are being lit (for the dusk is their favourite hour), as they must have done year after year. The elder is close on eighty; but if one asked her what her life has meant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for the battle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward the Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would look vague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie. All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were present; and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose 去书内
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  • Re Re

    Reading Notes on A Room of One’s Own In this extract, Virginia Woolf describes the lives of ordinary London women. These women spend their whole lives doing housework, cooking, washing and raising children. Their daily work takes up all their time. However, their personal experiences are almost completely forgotten. When asked about their own past, they can only remember public historical events instead of their private life. Woolf points out that official history, biographies and even traditional novels ignore these ordinary women. Countless obscure female lives are unrecorded. She imagines women on London streets: flower‑sellers, match‑sellers and wandering girls. Their real stories deserve to be written down in literature. This passage supports Woolf’s main idea: women need money and a room of their own to write. If women are trapped in endless housework, they have no time or space to express themselves. Their voices will be silenced.

    2026-09-20 喜欢(0) 回复(0)

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