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Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads stil lives. She lives in you and me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing preences; they need only the opportunity to walk among as in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so - I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little seperate lives which we live as individuals - and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to eachother but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in them selves; if we look past Milton's bogy, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportuinity will come, and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born.
-From A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf. (Essays on Feminism, and the subject of Women's Writing)