Helen Deutsch

Norma Clarke disagrees more with Paula Backscheider than with me (Letters, 5 October). I chose Woolf’s outdated, polemical and still (to Clarke’s dismay) powerful A Room of One’s Own as a ‘proleptic prequel’ to Backscheider’s book as a way to make sense of Backscheider’s attempt to imagine a separate women’s poetry in the 18th century. I contended that the nature of poetry-writing itself...