Thursday, January 14, 2010

Teaser ~ A Room of One's Own

Today's teaser quote is from the first paragraph of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929).
"But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction -- what has that got to do with a room of one's own? ... All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point -- a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction ... I am going to develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought which led me to think this. ... Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.  Therefore I propose, making use of all the liberties and licences of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here ... I need not say that what I am about to describe has no existence; Oxbridge is an invention; so is Fernham; 'I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.  Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping."

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