24 January 2009

Virginia Woolf by Nigel Nicolson



I could hardly put it down.

«Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‘our’ country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country, ‘For’, the outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’»
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1931). Read it in full here.

By the way, it becomes more evident for every day that Orlando is one of my greatest reads ever. Ever.