It was disappointing not to have brought back in the evening some important statement, some authentic¹ fact. Women are poorer than men because — this or that. Perhaps now it would be better to give up seeking for the truth, and receiving on one’s head an avalanche² of opinion hot as lava³, discoloured as dish-water. It would be better to draw the curtains; to shut out distractions⁵; to light the lamp; to narrow the enquiry and to ask the historian, who records not opinions but facts, to describe under what conditions women lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say, in the time of Elizabeth.

For it is a perennial⁶ puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet⁷. What were the conditions in which women lived? I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble⁸ upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment⁹ is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew¹⁰, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun¹¹ in mid-air by incorporeal¹² creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

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