Capital W, Capital W

Michael Wood

• Women Writers at Work edited by George Plimpton
  Harvill, 381 pp, £9.99, February 1999, ISBN 1 86046 586 2
• Just as I Thought by Grace Paley
  Virago, 332 pp, £8.99, August 1999, ISBN 1 86049 696 2

‘It is fatal for a woman,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘in any way to speak consciously as a woman.’ Fatal for her as a writer, Woolf meant, but even so, not many people will now agree with this view. Not all that many, perhaps, will understand it straight off. How could it be fatal? How could you not write or speak as a woman if you were one? Except by pretending to speak or write as a man. But Woolf didn’t want women to write like men. ‘It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only?’