Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing, pages 41-42

[O]ne of the victims of the double standard of content is Virgina Woolf herself, who writes earlier in A Room of One's Own: "all these good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman."

But she does not go on to say, although it's true, that the sort of heroine George Eliot drew is precisely the sort Tolstoy (whom she later mentions for the breadth of his experience) could not even see, let alone delineate, that the schoolgirls of Villette are a truth no male novelist had even guessed at, that in short the women confined to the houses of respectable clergymen knew not less than their brothers and fathers but other and that if the women did not know what the men knew, it is just as true to say that the men did not know what the women knew--and what the men did not know included what the women were.