Human happiness, the happiness of writers...questions by which we, in our age, seem enthralled...do not enter these pages.

What is important, what is essential, is that works of genius be created. In that writers' unhappiness interferes with their creation, one should be concerned with the happiness of writers. The important thing is that they must express reality; they must express their genius, not themselves. They must illuminate their own souls, but they must not allow the souls to get in the way of reality. For pitted against reality, against the great tradition of immortal literature, the self is puny; it is of no interest.

Mary Gordon, in the Foreword of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own