In the following essay, Gallagher compares A Room of One's Own to earlier tracts by women on writing, asserting that "the legitimacy" of Woolf's ' 'discourse rests on its being authentically hers."
Like many feminist literary critics, I discovered early modern women writers rather late, sometime in the 1970s, and I immediately understood why they had remained obscure. At that time they did not seem either strange enough to create the frisson of the exotic nor generative enough to have initiated a lineage of women writers reaching down to the present. Their obsolete concerns, eccentric assumptions, and bizarre claims, not to mention their generally impenetrable prose, failed to inspire aesthetic, New Historicist, or feminist interest in me. Here is an example of the sort of statement that left me cold: "My persuasion hath bene thus, that.....
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