Rebecca West: Difference between revisions
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* "...the word "idiot" comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature." | * "...the word "idiot" comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature." | ||
== External Links == | |||
* [http://knigite.abv.bg/en/rw/rw_prologue.html Prologue of ''Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, A Journey through Yugoslavia''] | |||
Revision as of 07:14, 27 April 2006
Rebecca West (1892-1983), British-Irish feminist, political journalist, novelist, historian, actress and traveller, who ought to need no introduction.
One of her novels, Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (1929) centers around a telepathic protagonist who is able to read her lover's thoughts.
Her definition of lunacy and idiocy, which appears in the prologue of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), has been used by such feminist writers as Joanna Russ (in the essay "SF and Technology and Mystification", 1978), and reads as follows:
- "...the word "idiot" comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature."