Missing Perspective

“All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple….And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends…They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that.” – Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own, 1929 –