A Room of One's Own Literature and Writing Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #7

The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women's books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be. (4.34)

We're picking up a major theme of A Room of One's Own here: when we think about art, we have to think about the body that produces it. Artists—as any writer could tell you—aren't just brains in vats.

Quote #8

For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been. (5.8)

Female friendship imagined as a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Without the Nazis, presumably.)

Quote #9

Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. [...] The whole of the mind must lie wide open [...] The writer, I thought, once his experience is over, must lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness. (6.9)

This is the big moment when Mary discovers that her boys-versus-girls ideas weren't helpful. Is it important that we get this idea in the form of a metaphor? And does "lie wide open" really mean what we think it does?