I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, indeed hours, she never dips in the inkpot.

The image that comes to mind when I think of this girl is of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water.

She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being.

The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had raced away. Sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber.
And then there was an explosion.

The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. She was roused from her dream in a state of acute and difficult distress. She had thought of something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say.

Men would be shocked by a woman who speaks the truth about her passions. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer.

This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers. They are impeded by the conventionality of the other sex.