Quote 16
All of these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, [...] and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo [...] or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways. (5.14)
Woolf can't seem to stop herself from hinting at all of the "unrecorded li[ves]" of women out there. Woolf does a lot of listing in A Room of One's Own. Does she always do it for the same reason?
Quote 17
If one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, alien and critical. (6.3)
So, being a member of civilization and being a woman is not always the same thing. We get that. It's hard to feel like a member of your own nation and culture when you're considered inferior.
Quote 18
What were the conditions in which women lived [during the Elizabethan era], I asked myself; for fiction [...] is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. (3.2)
A spider's web wouldn't work if it weren't attached to anything. This is a nice metaphor helping us see that fiction may be delicate and ethereal, but it's still connected to solid stuff.