And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. Virginia Woolf
About This Quote

We all know that fiction is not the same as reality, but the critic's comparison of "football and sport" with "war" and "the worship of fashion" with "the buying of clothes" is deeply unsettling. It is no wonder that Hugo failed to become an established novelist; he had allowed himself to slip into the mind of the average person.

Source: A Room Of Ones Own

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