feminish

This is Alice Walker, writing in her In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South (1974)

… Our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

Here’s the context of the quote, for completeness’s sak…

As Virginia Woolf wrote… in A Room of One’s Own:

“Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working class. [Change this to slaves and the wives and daughters of sharecroppers.] Now and again an Emily Brontë or a Robert Burns [change this to a Zora Hurston or a Richard Wright] blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils [or Sainthood], of a wise woman selling herbs [our rootworkers], or even 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. . . . Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. . . .”

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

This is Alice Walker, writing in her In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South (1974)

… Our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

Here’s the context of the quote, for completeness’s sak…

As Virginia Woolf wrote… in A Room of One’s Own:

“Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working class. [Change this to slaves and the wives and daughters of sharecroppers.] Now and again an Emily Brontë or a Robert Burns [change this to a Zora Hurston or a Richard Wright] blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils [or Sainthood], of a wise woman selling herbs [our rootworkers], or even 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. . . . Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. . . .”

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.