A Room of One's Own

According to Woolf, how did the repressed genius of women show itself?

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One way in which the repressed genius of women showed itself was through their writing...and their refusal to accept gender norms. These women held fast and stood strong... they held onto their integrity.

But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Bronte. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that. They alone were deaf to that persistent.

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A Room of One's Own