I am rooted, but I flow.

literary icons #1: Virginia Woolf.

Oh, Virginia!

Virginia Woolf by Lady Ottoline Morrell, June 1923.

She is the reason why I’m so passionate about the female side of literature.

Thanks to A Room of One’s Own I decided to investigate the ramifications of history, to discover and bring to light all the wonderful women that have been buried under a thick layer of ― I don’t want to sound rude, but yeah ― men.

And I’m not saying that the works of their counterparts were mediocre or worse, I’m just saying that after reading and seeing over and over again the works of men, who also talked about the female lives, feelings, and manners; at some point I wondered why I wasn’t reading about the female experience from the right perspective ― that of the women who were living it.

Obviously ― as Virginia Woolf pointed out in her numerous essays and A Room of One’s Own ― the reason is simple and yet so unsettling: women weren’t allowed to do this kind of creative work, most of them weren’t even alphabetized, and so on.

But, for the ones tha…