“But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence — of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.”

Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) vol. 3, p. 30.
Criticism

Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16

Interview in Writers at Work (1988)

The Second Sex (1949)

The Basic Teachings - Part 1: Principles of the Teaching (2009)

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
Context: The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

As quoted in Alexander the Great (1973) by Robin Lane Fox
Unsourced variant : Only sex and sleep make me conscious that I am mortal.

Writing About Jews (1963)