Quote 13
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, of a suppressed poet. (3.8)
This is a funny way to think of history: Woolf isn't looking for evidence that women writers were there, but instead showing us where they could have been. It makes a good story—but we wouldn't try it in history class.
Quote 14
Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. 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. (4.32)
Pot, meet kettle. Is Woolf being an "eternal pedagogue" too, or does she stop short of telling people what to write and think?
Quote 15
It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? (5.11)
Here's something radical: it sounds like Woolf is inviting us to imagine what sexes other than male and female might be like. A third sex? Or even five?