![]() ![]() Woolf also drew on Nightingale's work in A Room of One's Own, her seminal analysis of the historical relations between women and fiction, particularly in her discussion of the vital necessity of time and privacy for women's creative work. Nightingale had provided valuable first-hand testimony to back up his own indict ment of the family in the book he was then working on, The Subjection of Women. He was especially drawn by its depiction of family as an instrument of tyranny. JS Mill, sent a privately printed edition of the essay nearly 70 years earlier, had been less interested in its emotional temperature than in its application to his own theories on the condition of women. Virginia Woolf, reading Cassandra on first publication at the end of the 1920s, thought it more like screaming than writing. ![]() when they go to bed, as if they were going mad". At night they pay the price for their inactivity: "the accumulation of nervous energy. They are "never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted", and so fritter away their days in looking at prints, doing worsted work, reading out loud, and taking drives in the carriage. These women, she wrote, could find no outlet in "a cold and oppressive conventional atmosphere" to satisfy their "Passion, intellect" and "moral activity". To Nightingale, frustration at her own plight was mirrored in the experience of other women of her class in mid-19th century Britain. ![]()
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