For, lo, the voice of ye Mybugge hath been heard once more in the lande
Apparently some young (I think he must be relatively young?) bloke writer whose own career must so far be as the mayfly's compared to hers, has delivered himself of his opinion re Virginia Woolf (do we not think, my dearios, that Mrs W would have had him for breakfast and then desired a full English to fill up the space?): Woolf’s novels are not very good, and are unlikely to stand the test of time. Mr. Aciman has been trying to get our attention on this point for some time. “Mrs. Dalloway is an overrated novel that I don’t find particularly gripping or interesting. I’m not even sure it’s well written,” he told readers of The New York Times “By the Book” column in 2019. Since then he has done some research. “I always ask people if they understood To the Lighthouse,” he told his London Review Bookshop podcast interviewer, Brian Dillon, “and everyone says yes of course they do. Then I ask them a couple of questions and they say, ‘Yeah, you’re right. I guess it doesn’t make sense.’”
(Do we not distrust the invocation of 'people'? This is like somebody with whom one is at outs telling one that 'everybody' is saying such and such. Hmmmmm.)
Alyssa Harad: Like most women who write, I live my life according to the firmly stated judgments of literary men: Sadly, but without hesitation, I gathered my Woolf books into a pile destined for the used bookstore. Mr. Aciman had said the journals-he called them “the diary”-and A Room of One’s Own were OK (everyone knows women only really write about their own lives), but it seemed best to be on the safe side.
....
I picked up Orlando itself to put it back on the pile and found Woolf in a more grateful mood. “Finally,” she wrote, “I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.” I was taking a moment to reflect on the long history of such helpful men, still very busy in the present day thanks to the Internet-if only we had their names and addresses!-when my ginger Maine Coon swiped at To the Lighthouse and it slid across the floor to my feet and opened to Lily Briscoe trying to get through dinner with Mr. Tansley.
....
I opened the book at random to another spot, hoping to confirm Mr. Aciman’s judgment. “It was astonishing,” I read, “that a man of his intellect could stoop so low as he did-but that was too harsh a phrase-could depend so much as he did upon people’s praise.” Probably it was wishful thinking, but it seemed like these completely random passages were trying to tell me something. It was almost as though Woolf’s books as a whole were expounding on some kind of theme or circumstance I couldn’t quite put my finger on…
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Somehow, I connect this with this article about a very different sphere of endeavour for women: What If Everything We Know About Gymnastics Is Wrong?: [B]y merely training at the elite level, Memmel has flouted what is perhaps the most foundational notion in gymnastics training: that the world’s most talented gymnasts, after peaking in their teens, inevitably burn out before mature adulthood. This notion underpins the sport’s highly obedience-focused training philosophy and the way it positions the early and feverish intensity of its work environment as essential for athletic success. For years, calls to ease the authoritarian nature of gymnastics - and what many say are the unreasonable demands it places on young athletes’ spirits and bodies - have been countered by a mantra of necessity. Inhumane training may be tough on an athlete, goes the thinking, but it’s the only way to achieve dominance in a sport in which the window of opportunity is so short.
While presumably early training must influence this later capacity, the piece argues that the often abusive intensive training of very young gymnasts only leads to physical and mental burnout and trauma.
But it's about constraints and expectations and what women actually can do.
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