The love-business in fact of the Odyssey is turned on as we turn on
the gas--when we cannot get on without it, but not otherwise.
A fascinating brilliant girl, who naturally adopts for her patroness
the blue-stocking Minerva; a man-hatress, as clever girls so often
are, and determined to pay the author of the Iliad out for his
treatment of her sex by insisting on its superior moral, not to say
intellectual, capacity, and on the self-sufficient imbecility of man
unless he has a woman always at his elbow to keep him tolerably
straight and in his proper place--this, and not the musty fusty old
bust we see in libraries, is the kind of person who I believe wrote
the Odyssey. Of course in reality the work must be written by a
man, because they say so at Oxford and Cambridge, and they know
everything down in Oxford and Cambridge; but I venture to say that
if the Odyssey were to appear anonymously for the first time now,
and to be sent round to the papers for review, there is not even a
professional critic who would not see that it is a woman's writing
and not a man's.
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