Quote 19
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 20
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?
Quote 21
One only has to think of those Elizabethan tombstones with all those children kneeling with clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses with their dark, cramped rooms, to realise that no woman could have written poetry then. (4.1)
Freedom is also simply freedom to stretch and move in a spacious room. Would a dark, cramped room produce dark, cramped poetry? And why is dark, cramped poetry necessarily bad?