to write usefully on the subject: of
how many of the innumerable men who have written on it during the
same time, is it possible with truth to say more? If no woman has
hitherto been a great historian, what woman has had the necessary
erudition? If no woman is a great philologist, what woman has studied
Sanscrit and Slavonic, the Gothic of Ulphila and the Persic of the
Zendavesta? Even in practical matters we all know what is the value
of the originality of untaught geniuses. It means, inventing over
again in its rudimentary form something already invented and improved
upon by many successive inventors. When women have had the
preparation which all men now require to be eminently original, it
will be time enough to begin judging by experience of their capacity
for originality.

It no doubt often happens that a person, who has not widely and
accurately studied the thoughts of others on a subject, has by
natural sagacity a happy intuition, which he can suggest, but cannot
prove, which yet when matured may be an important addition to
knowledge: but even then, no justice can be done to it until some
other person, who does possess the previous acquirements, takes it in
hand, tests it, gives it a scientific or practical form, and fits it
into its place among the existing truths of philosophy or science. Is
it supposed that such felicitous thoughts do not occur to women? They
occur by hundreds to every woman of intellect. But they are mostly
lost, for want of a husband or friend who has the other knowledge
which can enable him to estimate them properly and bring them before
the world: and even when they are brought before it, they generally
appear as his ideas, not their real author's. Who can tell how many
of the most original thoughts put forth by male writers, belong to a
woman by suggestion, to themselves only by verifying and working out?
If I may judge by my own case, a very large proportion indeed.

If we turn from pure speculation to literature in the narrow sense of
the term, and the fine arts, there is a very obvious reason why
women's literature is, in its general conception and in its main
features, an imitation of men's. Why is the Roman literature, as
critics proclaim to satiety, not original, but an imitation of the
Greek? Simply because the Greeks came first. If women lived in a
different country from men, and had never read any of their writings,
they would have had a literature of their own. As it is, they