“… it seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.”

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Sarah Caudwell2

English barrister and writer 1939–2000

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“Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.”

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“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 3, pp. 43-44
Context: Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.