Letter to Virginia Woolf; From a Middle Eastern young girl, to her teen-hood idol.

To dear Ms. Virginia Wolf: on A Room of One’s Own

My dear Virginia,

By my words, I earnestly mean to console you, and to share with you my feelings of compassion. The day had just broken when I started to read; it is now well past midnight and my senses of empathy have been brimming over since. Let me tell you how much love and affinity I feel towards you when I read your words. You, in my heart, are as alive as the mythical sister of Shakespeare’s after the dream of peace and equality in women has come true; for what you said, I have lived. I read your words and talk sympathetically to you, so deeply as if you were here, as if we lived the whole thing together.

You lived in an age when even though “the path was nominally open” there was a lot left to struggle with and “many phantoms and obstacles …” looming in a woman’s way to success. Women were striving to claim their rights, and to handle efficiently the advantages they had just been entitled to. You also hoped that “if we live another century or so… have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own… then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down”.